Interorganizational Routines: Imprinting and Coordinating R&D Practices in International Alliances

Abstract

While routines within organizations have been at the core of research on organizational stability and change for decades, the scholarly interest in interorganizational routines is much more recent – despite the continued interest in interorganizational relations and networks. Notwithstanding first efforts to understand interorganizational routines, it is still unclear how these emerge from intraorganizational routines and develop over time. To answer this research question, we refer to recent attempts to balance agency and structure in research on intraorganizational routines by adopting a practice-based conceptualization informed by structuration theory. More importantly, we apply and extend the idea of imprinting and reveal the underlying mechanisms that cause the stabilization or modification of routines at the in-terorganizational level. Using an in-depth case study of an international R&D joint venture, the imprinting and development of a set of coordinating routines aimed at aligning the diverse practices of the R&D units of the two parent companies is delineated. The study contributes to a more balanced and contextual but also more mechanism-based theory of interorganizational routines structuration.