"Routine Structure and Knowledge Management: Impacts on Routine Attributes, Value and Imitability"

Abstract

Organizational routines play an important role in a number of theories of organization and strategic management, including evolutionary economics and the capability perspective. While recent ethnographic work has produced rich insights about the roles of structure and agency in the change and stability of routines, the concept of organizational routines has proved difficult to operationalize for comparative empirical work. This has limited the development and testing of new theory regarding how differences between routines serving the same purpose in different organizations may result in different organizational capabilities. Building on prior work conceptualizing routines as (components of) firm capabilities and on the knowledge-based view of the firm, this paper identifies a number of attributes which can be used to characterize organizational routines. I then discuss the relationships between routine attributes, routine value and routine imitability, as well as the moderating role of the environment in which the organization competes. Finally, I consider how a firm's choices regarding routine structure and knowledge management affect routine attributes, and how these relationships are moderated by the broader organizational context. The resulting conceptual framework can be used as a basis for consistent theorization and comparative analysis of routines that operate in a variety of contexts.