Organizational routines: toward a communicational perspective

How is routine organizing accomplished? Recent moves have conceptualized routines as dynamic rather than inert phenomena. While a useful development, the basis of this has been an incorrect reading of Latour’s (1986) ideas of ostensive and performative. I challenge this structuration-inspired appropriation and offer an alternative conceptualization based on the Montréal School’s perspective of organizational communication. Routines as communicatively constituted is offered as an alternative framing, one more in tune with Latour’s view of macro-micro distinctions. A “system of communicative inquiry” integrating co-orientation, deontism, teleaction and immutable mobile is advanced to frame research into the iterative processes of organizational functioning