WORK2017 - Work and Labour in the Digital Future 2017: Conference Abstracts

The routine aspect of work has emerged as a key construct in many subfields of management and organization studies. Fields such as strategic management (Felin & Foss, 2005), international management (Haleblian et al., 2009) and organization theory (Salvato & Rerup, 2011) have gained new insights by utilizing the routine construct. Despite these advances in multiple fields, the literature on routines is still riddled with ambiguities (Abell, Felin & Foss, 2008; Becker, 2004; Becker, 2008; Felin & Foss, 2009). Arguably, the ambiguity between action and potential action, the ambiguity between individual and collective level, and the ambiguity between stability and change are the most significant hindrances that deter the theoretical development of the routine concept (Becker, 2008). Recently, studying the micro-level origins of routines has been proposed as a robust candidate for answering the obstacles related to the theoretical development of the routine concept (Abell et. al., 2008; Felin & Foss, 2005; Felin & Foss, 2009; Gavetti, 2005). The need for studies on microfoundations of routines stems from the idea that many subfields of organization theory have began at some aggregate analytical level N at time t (Nt) in their early stages of development and thus implicitly assumed that micro-level (N-1t-1) phenomena have relatively uniform effects on aggregate level phenomena, for example uniformity among workforces in population ecology and culturally doped employees in institutional theory (Felin, Foss, Heimeriks & Madsen, 2012, 6–7). Consequently, by unpacking routines in microfoundational terms we will gain an understanding of routines’ different constituent components. Possibly the most comprehensive attempt to map the constituent components of routines has been Journal of Management Studies’ special issue ‘Micro-Origins of Organizational Routines and Capabilities’ (2012). Based on several recent theoretical and empirical studies that have devoted explicit attention to the micro-level origins of routines (Becker and Lazaric, 2003; Becker, Lazaric, Nelson & Winter, 2005; D’Addiero, 2009; Gavetti, 2005; Salvato, Sciascia & Alberti, 2009; Rerup & Feldman, 2011; Feldman & Pentland, 2003, Pentland & Feldman 2008; Teece, 2007) the editors of the special issue propose three constituent components of routines as a starting point for the microfoundational research agenda: 1) individuals, 2) processes and interactions, and 3) structure and design. Further, the editors conclude that the research agenda should focus on interactions between these three constituent components.The purpose of our study is to construct a model of organizational routines’ microfoundational dynamics. This model combines the constituent components – individuals, processes and interactions, structure and design – of organizational routines (Felin et al., 2012) with the major dynamics – variation and selective retention – that shape organizational routines (Pentland, Feldman, Becker & Liu 2012). As a part of the model, we examine the role of automatic human behavior in the workers who carry out their parts in organizational routine. As a result of this study, we discuss the model of organizational routines’ microfoundational dynamics in relation to the most significant ambiguities: individual versus collective level, action versus potential action, and stability versus change.Our findings are based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches on the data collected from the top professional ice hockey league in Finland. This league has recently invested in such digital technologies as a smart puck and wearable transmitters, which have significantly transformed the way in which game statistics can be generated. From a theoretical perspective these advanced game statistics represent structures, which will contain less variance than traditional statistics or rankings. Alongside with quantitative data, namely the advanced statistics, we interview and observe professional ice hockey coaches and players to make sense of how they experience the developmental steps in the digitalization and the resultant changes in their work routines. Consequently, we hypothesize that this more detailed information will change the work of coaches and players. Team sport provides us a particularly transparent research context to observe these probable changes in routinized work. Our study contributes the debate between studies in which routines are seen as actions (eg. Pentland, Haerem & Hillison, 2010; Salvato & Rerup, 2011) and studies in which routines are seen as potential actions (eg. Birnholtz, Cohen & Hoch, 2007; Hodgson, 2008; Knudsen, 2008) by illustrating how these two previously incompatible viewpoints can be combined in one model, which attempts to estimate the path dependency inside the routine with probabilities. Specifically, this idea – originally presented by Pentland et. al. (2012) – is applied to incorporate the path dependency between routine performances by demonstrating how different structures retain different amounts of the endogenous variance in routine. Second, we contribute the stability versus change discussion (Becker, 2004; Cohen, Burkhart, Dosi, Egidi, Marengo, Warglien & Winter 1996.) by examining how both human and non-human actors affect variation and selective retention in the iterations of the routine (cf. Pentland et. al., 2012; Turner & Fern, 2012).