7 - New routines and practices

Question 1

Organizational Routines

Answer 1

• Associated with getting things done

- Repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors

Question 2

Organizational capability

Answer 2

• Higher level bundle of routines
• Associated with putting organizational resources into organizational actions
• Learned by practicing
• Confers upon an organization’s management a set of decisions
• Hierarchically organized: higher level capabilities modify lower level’s
• Dynamic capabilities involve
  > Capacity of an organization to purposefully create, extend or modiy a firms productor service offerings, processes for generating and/or delivering a product or service, or customer markets

Question 3

Obstfeld - Routines

Answer 3

• Not only a source of stability and inertia
  > Also flexibility and considerable change originating from within the routine itself
• Adaptation to routines seems disruptive,
  > also preserves the deeper underlying structure

Question 4

Obstfeld - The creative project

Answer 4

• An emergent trajectory of interdependent action initiated and orchestrated by multiple actors to introduce change into a social contex
• Conducted as if conducted for the first time
• The objective and how that objective is pursued, not whether it is realized, identifies a project as creative
• Less repetitive project form of routine action

Question 5

Obstfeld - Trajectories

- Components

Answer 5

• Projection: A vision of an expeted or desired outcome and associated course of action
• Scheme: Plan to realize vision
• Management: Actions employed to shape trajectory through all phases

Question 6

Obstfeld- Ostensive (clearly demonstrating) trajectory

- consists of

Answer 6

Consists of Pojection and Scheme

Question 7

Obstfeld - Performative trajectories

- Consists of

Answer 7

Consists of trajectory management

• Knowledge articulation
• Combinatorial action:
• Contingency management

Question 8

Obstfeld - Knowledge articulation

Answer 8

The social process by which knowledge is made more explicit, usable, or relevant to the situation at hand

Question 9

Obstfeld - Combinatiorial action

Answer 9

• Individuals who connect people or coordinate action within their social networks
• Linking activity to organizational change efforts (Tertius Iungens)

(Tertius Iungens: a strategic behavioral orientation toward connecting people in one’s social network by either introducing disconnected individuals or by facilitating new coordination between connected individuals)

Question 10

Obstfeld - Contingency management

Answer 10

• Responses to exceptions or uncertainty
• Improvisation found within the routine
• How two creative projects initiatives addressed uncertainties with respect to participation, executive support, legitimacy, and what to do next time

Question 11

Canato: Six Sigma

Answer 11

• Enhance efficiency in manufacturing
• Applied to administrative processes: enhances process standardization and efficiency
• DMAIC method
• Define
• Measure
• Analyze
• Improve
• Control

Question 12

Canato - Cultural fit

Answer 12

The degree of the compatibility between a new practice and the existing organizational culture of a potential adopter.

Low cultural fit

• delay adoption new practices,
• Implement the practice ceremonially
• Adapt practice to improve fit

Question 13

Canato - Coercion of new practice

Answer 13

• e.g. by new CEO
• Can lead to tension and resistance
• Coercion and resistance cannot coexist forever
  > either rejection of new practice
  > or adaptation towards new practice
• In the end coercion can lead to succesful radical orgaizational change, when there’s adaption

Question 14

Canato - Practice adaptation

• what is it
• what are the effects of consensus

Answer 14

Practice implementation:

• Fidelty: Loyalty towards old practices
• Extensiveness of implementation: the extent to which the new practice is adopted across functional divisional or geographical org units.
• Causes alteration of customary behavioral patterns

Increasing consensus consolidates form of implementation
Decreasing consesnsus induce removal or alteration elements of practice

Question 15

Canato - Cultural change

• What is it
• How is it structured
• How can it be changed

Answer 15

Cultural believes define criteria of assesment of the relative fit and “goodness” of the new practice.
Core values define the boundaries of acceptable cultural dissonance

Organizational culture:
- Cultural repetoire
> Internalized believes and behavioral norms
- Core values

Prolonged coerced engagement in different patterns of behavior, and exposure to their effects, enrich the cultural repetoire and may induce partial change in cultural believes

Question 16

Canato - Sensegiving and Sensemaking

Answer 16

Leaders sensegiving: Leader’s selling the change to members. Effects members sensemaking

• Symbolic tactics
• Discursive tactics
• Language types

Members sensemaking

• experience of partial implication and cultural dissonance
• Emergent collective judgement of new practices
• Eventually reinterpretation of retained practices as fitting traditional values (Reframing)

Question 17

Total quality management

• Examples
• Goal
• How it works
• Why is it used

Answer 17

• E.g. Lean / six sigma / kanban
• Efficiency & quality increase in manufacturing

Works through

• analysis of production inefficiencies
• process reengineering and optimization
• continuous learning

Why is it used?
-	Doesn't increase performance
-	Firms mimic eachother'stemplates, 
             > FoMO 
             > Reduced risk: if its bad, everyone is losing
-	Image, looking modern / appropriate 
-	Norms of rationality and purpose