Organizational Routines as Patterns of Action: Implications for Organizational Behavior

In recent years, organizational routines have been studied in a wide variety of settings, including law, medicine, accounting, and engineering. This fieldwork has led to a broader understanding of organizational routines as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent action, carried out by multiple actors. Routines are seen as practices that are situated in a social/material context. Within an organizational routine, individual actions are situated in a broader pattern of actions that can be represented as a network. Recognizing patterns of interdependent action as a unit of analysis entails a research paradigm that has implications for a range of topics in organizational behavior.