Martha S. Feldman, Brian T. Pentland, Luciana D’Adderio, Katharina Dittrich, Claus Rerup, and David Seidl, eds. Cambridge Handbook of Routine Dynamics

Abstract

In 1841, 180 years before the Cambridge Handbook of Routine Dynamics was published, Ralph Waldo Emerson anticipated its message. In his essay ‘‘Circles’’ he wrote, ‘‘The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.’’ If we examine degrees of permanence as they apply to the organizational routines discussed in this handbook, then the traditional view that routines are static, repetitive entities becomes one in which routines are treated as patterned, transient, and enacted entanglements. Permanence is short-lived. What seemed static are now, according to this volume, ‘‘temporary and unstable achievements constantly threatening to pull apart and dissolve into patterns and parts that are no longer the same routine’’ (p. 93). These dynamics are not the dualism of stability and change but the duality of patterning and performing: ‘‘A routine is only stable-for-now and its stability is an ongoing accomplishment’’ (p. 467). While this way of analyzing routines has been in development for at least 20 years, this handbook pulls together resources that articulate and enlarge routine dynamics as a ‘‘way of seeing, analyzing, and understanding patterns of action’’ (p. xv). In the remainder of this review, I first simplify the focal perspective, after which I comment on the construction, content, and context created by the handbook. Routines are not invariant sequences, nor are they stable entities separated from change. Instead, routines have an ‘‘internal logic’’ that involves ‘‘the emergence, reproduction, replication, and change of recognizable patterns of action’’ (p. 1). The situated enactment of a routine is the site where people observe the entangled production of outcomes and the potential re-patterning of the original guidance. While this form of practice is action-centric rather than actor-centric, the acting is framed as ‘‘enactment’’ to preserve the agency and creative, improvisational ‘‘doing’’ that performs the patterns. The acting is also framed as ‘‘entanglement’’ to underscore the relationality and multiplicity of process and context. For example, an effort to transfer a routine from one site to another ‘‘involves the effortful enactment of the complex socio-material entanglement which underpins a routine’’ (p. 279). The ontology is both ‘‘flat,’’ forgoing micro–macro levels of reality, and ‘‘fluid,’’ where ‘‘things gain their being from the relations predicated of them’’ (p. 11). The key concepts of this approach include effortful, emergent accomplishments; modification of ostensive and performative properties;