Organizational routines: Evolution in the research landscape of two core communities

Abstract

Organizational routines are a popular field of research dominated by two communities of scholars: the capability community and the practice community. Based on a bibliometric study of 635 peer-reviewed articles, this paper proposes a systematic analysis of the recent contributions to the field made by the two communities. Our findings yield two main insights. First, we show that, even if both communities have been contributing to advancing the scholarly understanding of routines, practice scholars’ research has grown faster than capability scholars’ in recent years. Second, using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm for text analysis, we identify 33 research topics that have sparked scholars’ interest in the period 2005–2016 and we explore the evolution of key topics. Specifically, we observe that topics characteristic of each community concerned the theoretical foundations of organizational routines and, for practice scholars, also context-related internal dynamics. We also find diverging topics that created gaps between the two communities. For capability scholars, diverging topics pertained to specific aspects of the theoretical foundations, such as dynamic and ordinary capabilities, and the effects of routines. For practice scholars, diverging topics pertained to context-related internal dynamics of routines. These insights provide a comprehensive map of the research landscape illustrating that, even if the communities have maintained parallel conversations, their growing interest could lead to synergies.