The Persistence of Flexible Organizational Routines - INFORMS ...

Organization Science

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Vol. 16, No. 6, November–December 2005, pp. 618–636 issn 1047-7039 eissn 1526-5455 05 1606 0618

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doi 10.1287/orsc.1050.0150 © 2005 INFORMS

The Persistence of Flexible Organizational Routines: The Role of Agency and Organizational Context Jennifer A. Howard-Grenville

Organizational Behavior Department, Boston University School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, [email protected]

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nce regarded as stable and inflexible, organizational routines are increasingly seen as capable of being adapted to the situation at hand and a potentially important source of endogenous change in organizations. This paper considers why routines that are performed flexibly may nonetheless persist over time. Drawing on data from participant observation of a high-tech manufacturing company, I identify factors that contribute to both the flexibility and persistence of a routine. First, individuals and groups approach routines with different intentions and orientations, suggesting that agency shapes particular routine performances. Second, routine performances are embedded in an organizational context that, while it may not restrict the flexible use of a routine, may constrain its ongoing adaptation. Finally, accounting for the relative power of individuals sheds light on the interaction between agency and context in routine performance and explains why the actions of some individuals, but not others, can change routines. This paper draws on recent work that conceptualizes routines as ongoing accomplishments, and it extends it by identifying how actors and contexts shape both individual performances of routines and contribute to their persistence or change over time. Key words: organizational routines; agency; organizational change

contribute to both dynamics, and how do they contribute? While we know a great deal about a wide variety of routines in a wide variety of organizational settings (Gersick and Hackman 1990, Adler et al. 1999, Weick et al. 1999, Feldman 2000, Narduzzo et al. 2000, Edmondson et al. 2001), we know much less about how the people enacting a routine and the context in which it is enacted influence both a routine’s use at a given point in time and its change or persistence over time. These are the key concerns of this paper. Cognitive and socioemotional explanations have been offered for the persistence or change of habitual group routines (Langer 1986, Gersick and Hackman 1990), but this paper focuses on routines that involve task performance, where these tasks are to be performed by a single group or interdependently by members of multiple groups within an organization. Consistent with a performative perspective on routines (Feldman and Pentland 2003, Feldman 2003), I adopt the definition of a routine as “a repetitive, recognizable pattern of interdependent actions, involving multiple actors” (Feldman and Pentland 2003, p. 96). In emphasizing that routines consist of patterns of interdependent actions, the definition is consistent with earlier work on organizational routines as sequences of coordinated actions (Nelson and Winter 1982, Cohen and Bacdayan 1994). However, the definition also allows for a shift of attention away from the patterns per se and toward the situated actions performed by multiple actors as they intentionally or unintentionally recreate or change these patterns.

Routines are central to organizing (March and Simon 1958, Cyert and March 1963, Feldman and Pentland 2003), so central in fact that routines explain the behavior of firms (Nelson and Winter 1982, p. 128). Or do they? Routines have traditionally been seen as a source of organizational inertia, and their intentional recombination a source of organizational adaptation (Cyert and March 1963, Nelson and Winter 1982). However, recent work also demonstrates the opposite: The everyday use of routines can bring about change (Feldman 2000, Feldman and Pentland 2003), and the intentional alteration of routines can result in no change (Edmondson et al. 2001, Feldman 2003). How do we explain these apparent contradictions? Recent work has shown that routines are sources of both stability and change in organizations (Gersick and Hackman 1990, Pentland and Rueter 1994, Weick et al. 1999, Feldman 2000, Feldman and Pentland 2003). Intentionally or not, individuals and groups depart from the standard practices routines are said to specify (Dougherty 1992, Leidner 1993, Adler et al. 1999, Feldman 2000, Narduzzo et al. 2000, Victor et al. 2000). When this occurs, the “same” routine allows a variety of actual performances and some of these performances may, in turn, alter the routine over time. The first dynamic—which may be regarded as flexibility in routine use—begets the second dynamic—change in the routine over time, but it need not. When does the flexible use of a routine produce change over time and when does it not? What factors 618

Howard-Grenville: The Role of Agency and Organizational Context Organization Science 16(6), pp. 618–636, © 2005 INFORMS

In this paper I use data from a nine-month ethnographic study of a high-tech manufacturing organization, Chipco,1 to build theory on the persistence and change of flexible, task-oriented routines. Central to Chipco’s technology development practices, “roadmapping” was a pervasive, persistent organizational routine that nonetheless, on close inspection, admitted a lot of variation. Following other work that builds theory from the in-depth study of routines within a single organization (Leidner 1993, Pentland and Rueter 1994, Adler et al. 1999, Feldman 2000, Narduzzo et al. 2000, Feldman 2003), this paper closely examines multiple performances of Chipco’s roadmapping routine and draws from them factors that can explain the flexible use and persistence or change of routines over time in other settings. Two key factors emerged from the data as important to individual performances of the routine and its change over time. First, Chipco’s members brought to performances of roadmapping their own distinctive orientations toward the situation at hand, and their own intentions. Some enacted the routine habitually, while others imagined new uses for it. Some uses served multiple individual and group ends that were peripheral to the organizational ends of the routine. Put simply, agency mattered to the individual performances of the routine. Furthermore, as a collective accomplishment, a given routine performance came about through tacit negotiation of individual intentions and orientations, so the agency of multiple actors, and their relative power, mattered also. A second key factor explained why, in the face of this variability, the roadmapping routine at Chipco persisted more or less unchanged over time. The organizational context—specifically, aspects of the technology in use, the patterns of coordination, and the culture—all strongly shaped performances of the routine. In many cases, these other factors reinforced each other as well as ongoing use of the routine. I introduce the construct of embeddedness to capture the degree to which the use of a routine overlaps with the enactment of other organizational structures (Sewell 1992). While the embeddedness of a routine may not prevent actors from improvising individual performances, it may prevent these improvisations from being taken up and perpetuated as an ongoing part of the routine. This paper makes several distinct contributions to the literature on the stability and change of routines. First, it shows empirically that different orientations of an agent—to the past, present, or future—and their different intentions, shape particular routine performances. Work that emphasizes the transmission of routines and rules between individuals over time (Cyert and March 1963), and the contribution of professionalization, selection, and training to routine performance within organizational roles (Cyert and March 1963, Dosi et al. 2000),

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fails to adequately account for agency and suggests that actors may be interchangeable when they engage a routine. The Chipco data strongly suggest they are not, and that actors approach routines with an orientation to iterate past performances, selectively apply aspects of the routine to the situation at hand, or actively alter the routine for future performances. Further, actors may use routine performances to strategically advance both personal and organizational goals. Agency explains both why routines may change over time, and why they may persist, and in this paper I suggest that discerning between the two outcomes involves discerning the particular intentions and orientations of the actors. Contextualizing the exercise of agency and its impact on the use of routines answers a call to bring more explicit attention to agency to our understanding of routines (Feldman and Pentland 2003). Second, the paper develops new explanations for the persistence of routines over time. If routines are performed flexibly, then the traditional explanations offered for their persistence—that they eliminate search and simplify choice among alternatives (March and Simon 1958) or that they become habitual and suppress deliberation even when it would be desirable (Staw et al. 1981, Gersick and Hackman 1990, Ashforth and Fried 1998)— are no longer sufficient on their own. In addition to the finding that agency can contribute to persistence, the Chipco data show that the embeddedness of the routine’s performances in other aspects of the organization shapes possibilities for the routine’s change over time. Others have noted that routines are never performed in a vacuum, but often overlap with other routines (Narduzzo et al. 2000) or other aspects of how a group or organization operates (Gersick and Hackman 1990, Feldman 2003). This paper builds on these ideas and shows how particular aspects of the organizational context— technological, coordination, and cultural structures— shape whether and how a routine can change over time. A final contribution of the paper is in exploring how power shapes the interaction between agency and context to contribute to either the change or persistence of routines over time. While agency matters to situated performances of routines, we know that the agency exercised by individuals differs in both kind and extent (Sewell 1992). The Chipco data show that different actors are more or less able to use a routine flexibly, and more or less able to influence whether a new kind of performance will be taken up as part of an ongoing routine. While earlier work asserts that some actors, but not others, have the power to “turn exceptions into rules” (Feldman and Pentland 2003, p. 110), this paper builds on these insights. It suggests that different forms of power may be needed to change a routine over time, particularly when such a change involves altering different aspects of the organizational context in which the routine is embedded.

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In this paper I distinguish between the idea that routines continuously admit change, and the idea that they continuously change over time, by identifying factors— agency and embeddedness—that contribute in different ways to both dynamics. Because these factors manifest differently in different organizations, for different routines in the same organization, or even for the same routine in a given organization, they can start to explain why different routines change at different rates, a question that calls for further elaboration (Feldman and Pentland 2003). They can also start to explain the wide variety of routine performances observed in practice, and the apparently contradictory findings on the organizational outcomes of routine use. In the rest of this paper I give a brief overview of recent work on routines that provides a starting point for the subsequent analysis. I then outline my methodology for gathering and analyzing data on the roadmapping routine at Chipco, and describe representative performances of roadmapping to demonstrate the core elements of the routine as well as various ways the routine was actually used. Following this, I describe the factors that emerge from the data to explain the flexible use of the roadmapping routine, as well as its persistent use. I use these factors, as well as structuration theory (Giddens 1984, Sewell 1992) and agency theory (Emirbayer and Mische 1998), to develop a model of flexible yet persistent routines. Finally, I generalize the findings to consider under what conditions of agency and embeddedness routines may be performed more or less flexibly, and under what conditions they may change or persist over time.

New Understandings of Organizational Routines

Routines have traditionally been depicted as the “memory of an organization” (Cyert and March 1963, p. 101), representing an accretion of rules and practices that have been used to deal with uncertain, complex situations and suppress goal conflict between organizational subunits (Nelson and Winter 1982). Routines as “standard operating procedures” bring stability to organizational activity and change only slowly (Cyert and March 1963), with some notable negative consequences. At the individual level, the effects of routine task performance include mindlessness and consequent inattention to changes in the task environment (Langer 1986, Ashforth and Fried 1988, Cohen and Bacdayan 1994). At the organizational or group level, the effects include inappropriate use of routines in situations that warrant reflexivity, and possibly heightened commitment to routines in novel or threatening situations where the best outcomes would be obtained by abandoning or altering a routine (Staw et al. 1981, Gersick and Hackman 1990, Louis and Sutton 1991, Ashmos et al. 1998).


Recent work, however, suggests that many organizational routines are not enacted habitually and with little discretion on the part of actors. Those who use routines make adjustments to their performances in response to prior outcomes (Feldman 2000) or they can intentionally change a routine through a collective learning process (Edmondson et al. 2001). Other research shows routines being used successfully in dynamic environments. Some organizations that are highly routinized, like automobile manufacturing plants, can nonetheless respond flexibly to changes (Adler et al. 1999); and others operating in turbulent, hypercompetitive environments, like telecommunications and electronics, still develop shared routines or cognitive frameworks that guide action (Bogner and Barr 2000). Indeed, early work on organizational routines accounted for some of this variance. Nelson and Winter observed that “routine operation is consistent with routinely occurring laxity, slippage, rule-breaking, defiance, and even sabotage” (1982, p. 108). Cohen and Bacdayan noted that routines become “ ‘contaminated’ with extraneous, historically specific and arbitrary components” (1994, p. 556). However, to the extent that slippages are taken as exceptions rather than inherent to the performance of routines, the focus remains on the repeated action sequences, or “ ‘chunks’ of organized activity with a repetitive character” (Dosi et al. 2000), not on the situated actions that are actually performed, or the actors performing them. Shifting the emphasis to situated routine performances, Feldman and Pentland (2003) argue that routines consist of both idealized, abstract understandings, or ostensive aspects, and specific performances in specific times and places, or performative aspects. The recursive relationship between the ostensive and performative is essential for the ongoing accomplishment of the routine, and generates a new understanding of routines as emergent structures (Giddens 1984). The ostensive aspect acts as a guide for what actions should be taken in performing a routine, and can also account for actions already taken. It signifies what is distinctive about a set of activities that can be called a routine. Conversely, the performance of a routine recreates, maintains, and may modify the ostensive aspect of the routine (Feldman and Pentland 2003). While routine performances may be flexible, they may or may not produce change over time in the ostensive aspect of the routine. Missing from this new view of routines is an empirically based elaboration of specific factors that link the performance of routines to abstract understandings of them, and an account of how these factors contribute to both the flexibility and change or persistence of routines over time. How do individuals’ intentions influence the performances, and how does the context in which routines are performed contribute to their persistence or change? Pentland and Rueter assert that the


persistence of routines “arises from the way the work is organized, structural features of the situation, and the cognitive models of the participants” (1994, p. 504) but their work emphasizes elements of routines that can be abstracted and compared across settings, rather than particular features of a setting that can be used to explain the embeddedness of routines. Feldman (2003) shows that particular features of the organizational context were relevant to reproducing a routine even when the organization’s members intentionally intended to change it. The Chipco data enable a close analysis of a routine and its organizational context from which to expand on this prior work.

Setting and Methods

Chipco is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of semiconductor products, or computer “chips.” Chipco’s fabrication facilities, or “fabs,” use advanced manufacturing technologies to create chips on a silicon substrate. Each chip, roughly the size of a person’s thumbnail, contains more than 10 million transistors, which are built and connected to each other using hundreds of precise and sequential processing steps. A leading semiconductor manufacturer like Chipco significantly updates its manufacturing process every two years in order to produce faster, higher-performance chips. A permanent group existed at Chipco to develop the new equipment and procedures, and this roughly 1,500-member group, Manufacturing Technology Development (Tech), was the broad focus of my study. Tech provided an excellent setting in which to study how routines are used in practice. Manufacturing process development, as a core activity in the company for over 30 years, operated with well-developed procedures and norms. These included guidelines for determining when process equipment needed updating, practices used to explore and evaluate alternatives, decision-making procedures to guide selection among alternatives, and experimental techniques used to qualify selected equipment or process configurations. In other words, routines played an important part in typical process development practices. On the other hand, there were many opportunities to observe the flexible use of routines. In particular, a relatively new group, EnviroTech, had been formed within a few years of my study to work with members of Tech to understand and mitigate the potential environmental impact of future manufacturing technologies. As this group sought to integrate their practices more fully with those of Tech, they began to use many of Tech’s routines even when the match between typical routine performances and EnviroTech’s needs was less than ideal. Data Collection I conducted nine months of full-time (45 plus hours per week) participant observation at Chipco. I used

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an inductive, theory-generating approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Numagami 1998) aimed at developing an understanding of the routines and practices used at Chipco and their implications for the organization’s adaptability. My role as a participant within the EnviroTech group (and not merely an observer) gave me unique insight into the tacit and explicit aspects of Chipco’s routines and the broader organizational and technological context in which they were enacted. I too had to develop work plans, participate in projects, and deliver results.2 The data used here derive from three primary sources: field notes, semistructured interviews, and documents. Field Notes. I wrote field notes daily during the course of observations and for several hours at the end of each day to capture observations in more detail. My physical location at Tech’s dedicated development site (unusual for a member of EnviroTech) allowed me to establish many formal and informal ties with engineers and managers from Tech. I had ongoing interactions with several key informants from Tech, as well as members of other groups who worked on the periphery of Tech. Through these interactions, as well as my own experience working with Tech employees in my participant role, I gained an understanding of the work and culture at Tech, as well as that within EnviroTech. Semistructured Interviews. I performed several dozen semistructured interviews with members of Tech, EnviroTech, and other related groups to gather data on particular process development projects, as well as on specific routines used in process development. Several of those interviewed became regular informants with whom I was able to follow up informally, filling in gaps in my data, and checking discrepancies arising from multiple sources. Documents. I collected a number of documents, including reports, meeting agendas and minutes. I also gathered documents (e.g., presentations and reports) on projects and practices from those I interviewed. Data Analysis In an initial analysis, I read my field notes, interview transcripts, and relevant documents for recurring themes and built up a database of observations and categories from which I constructed a representation of the work and culture of Tech and the work and culture of EnviroTech. In this paper, I use this analysis in two ways: first, to select a routine for study that is both pervasive and important to work at Chipco, and second, to identify the organizational, technological, and cultural structures within which the routine is enacted. Selecting a Routine. For this paper, I reanalyzed my data to search for performances of specific routines.

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I chose to focus on the routine known as “roadmapping” because it was both very widely used and it seemed to inform other routines and practices at Chipco. I found that I had observed at least some aspects of the roadmapping routine being enacted at every one of the nine monthly Strategic Planning Council (SPC) meetings I had attended, and in most cases, had observed some steps of the routine enacted several times in the course of a single meeting. I had also interviewed two SPC chairs (one from Tech and one from EnviroTech) specifically on their use of the routine, and I had informally observed dozens of uses of or references to roadmapping through interviews and interactions with Tech and EnviroTech engineers and managers. Importantly, I had data on roadmapping performances both within the long-established Tech group, and within the EnviroTech group, as well as performances that included both Tech and EnviroTech members. Within-Case Analysis. Using my fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and documents produced for and around the SPC meetings, I wrote vignettes on the specific uses of roadmapping I had observed and/or collected interview or archival data on. This within-case analysis (Miles and Huberman 1994) allowed me to consider the complexity and preserve the narrative sequence of each roadmapping performance (Abbott 1992), and from this I was able to begin to identify factors that contributed to the flexible use of the routine. Between-Case Analysis. I compared across the performances of roadmapping using a mixed strategy (Miles and Huberman 1994), which involved moving back and forth between the details of each performance and extracting similar steps and patterns. From this I was able to construct a generic representation of the roadmapping routine. By comparing across uses I also began to identify factors that seemed to explain the relative stability of roadmapping across settings. This combination of within-case and between-case analyses allowed me to attend to both the abstract understandings of the roadmapping routine and the actual uses of it, and, crucially, the relationship between the two. Working back and forth between factors that emerged from the data, and the detailed vignettes themselves, I developed a model of roadmapping at Chipco that explained its flexible use as well as aspects of its persistence. I then went back to my earlier analysis of the work and culture of Tech and used this to elaborate the model to consider how the routine was embedded in other aspects of the organization and how this contributed to its persistence. In the next section I use a specific performance to introduce a generic representation of the roadmapping routine. I then relate in some detail three other representative performances of roadmapping in order to first demonstrate the key components of collective


understanding of roadmapping at Chipco, and to illustrate the factors that contributed to the flexibility of roadmapping and its persistent use.

Roadmapping at Chipco Roadmapping Performance 1: Technology Development Roadmap. After two months in the field, I met with Katherine, a Tech manager, who was the “roadmap owner” for a particular subset of process equipment. My aim was to understand how roadmapping was used in the area in which it was first developed and most rigidly applied, selecting equipment for future manufacturing processes. Katherine opened the meeting by asking me to tell her what I was doing and, after I answered, probed me to specify the objective of my work, preferably in terms of my MBPs (Management by Plan, or work plan objectives). I had been received in this manner several times already at Chipco, and I understood it as one manifestation of a widespread belief that work at Chipco is targeted to specific and measurable outcomes and that information is shared on a “need to know” rather than “FYI” basis. Katherine, like virtually everyone I encountered in Tech, seemed to have a lot on her plate and ran on a tight schedule. She described her workload in terms of how many roadmap decisions had to be made. “I just looked at my horizon projects for the next year and there are about 60 decisions that need to be made for [my process area], and about two-thirds of them are ramp + 2 and one-third are ramp + 1.” “Ramp,” she explained, refers to the manufacturing process generation that is currently being scaled to full volume in the manufacturing fabs. As a roadmap owner, Katherine chaired a strategic decision making body (Strategic Planning Council, or SPC) that was responsible for making these roadmap decisions. She noted that her SPC was just “making the last decisions on ramp + 1,” the next generation manufacturing process that would be rolled out to the fabs in roughly two years time. Really, she added, the job of the SPC is to focus on the “strategic decisions” about the subsequent, ramp + 2, generation, and “generate the roadmaps” for the ramp + 3 generation that would move into manufacturing in roughly six years time. The SPC has to have the right data to make a decision, Katherine observed, because, once made, “a decision really has to mean something and people have to trust it and then go and make it happen.” She added, “some people don’t realize the level of detail the SPC needs to see in order to make a decision, some people view the meetings as an FYI, but that’s not the point.” The point of the SPCs, according to Katherine, was to generate roadmaps that identify future issues. For this, she observed, there needs to be a dialogue between roadmap owners. She expressed her frustration with those responsible for the environmental roadmap


because she felt that a certain important problem that had affected her group’s work “just came along from somewhere.” Used properly, roadmaps provide a detailed map of the near future, and render it manageable. The “Generic” Roadmapping Routine As this performance shows, roadmapping functioned in Tech as a form of organizational memory, as representative of organizational goals, and as a truce between the organization’s members, three hallmarks of routines according to Nelson and Winter (1982). Roadmapping functioned to reduce uncertainty by reducing the future into a set of decisions and goals that could be represented on a document, or “roadmap.” It also coordinated organizational activity by triggering and enabling action within a given group and between groups. Finally, roadmapping both reflected and reinforced power relations in the organization (e.g., roadmap owners expect others to act on the outcomes). Roadmapping had been in place in Tech long enough for a generic form of the routine to have emerged. From the data, I define roadmapping broadly as a series of actions (see Table 1) to define criteria, consider alternatives, and reach consensus on solutions for specific future needs. SPCs, the bodies primarily responsible for making roadmap decisions, were first used in Tech in the mid-1980s. At the time of my fieldwork, about 15 years later, more than a dozen SPCs operated within Tech and other groups. Multiple roadmaps may be owned by a particular SPC, and roadmaps were developed at different levels of detail and “rolled up” into higher-level roadmaps. Roadmapping and the production of roadmaps were considered central to work at Tech because it was through roadmapping that critical technical decisions were made and coordination achieved that enabled the development of a complex new manufacturing process with hundreds of discrete steps and dozens of pieces of equipment. Despite its pervasiveness and complexity, there was no written codification of how to perform roadmapping, nor did roadmapping produce a completely standard form of a document.3 From the many uses of roadmapping I observed, I identified a typical, generic sequence of activities that comprise roadmapping at Chipco. These steps are shown in Table 1, and examples from the data are given to illustrate how the steps are enacted. The examples are drawn from multiple performances of the roadmapping routine, as the entire routine is almost never performed in a single cycle from start to finish. In reality, different aspects of process technology development in a given area are often in a different part of the roadmapping cycle, so SPC members may, in the course of a single meeting, set future roadmap goals for one process step, ratify a decision on a piece of equipment for a different process step, and hear a challenge to a decision made earlier for another process step.

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Drawing on the appropriate SPC and, preferably, owners of related roadmaps, a roadmap owner will assess future process needs in his or her process area. Goals are then typically established for each process step and manufacturing generation. Decisions about which equipment or procedures to use to achieve these goals are made, using data provided by Tech engineers. Reaching a decision may occur over the course of several monthly SPC meetings as data are accumulated, analyzed, and presented. Once a decision is made and ratified by SPC members, the equipment or procedure is considered POR (Plan of Record) and is only removed from the roadmap under exceptional circumstances. As engineers “execute the roadmap,” they may uncover unexpected results or need to reconsider a POR selection. An actual challenge to the roadmap occurs only infrequently, as typically the engineers will solve the problem and “make it work,” usually by developing technical solutions. However, if a change to the roadmap is needed, volumes of data must be presented to the SPC to justify the change, and the new approach must be ratified by all affected SPCs and changed on all affected roadmaps. Representative Roadmapping Performances The next three performances further illustrate how roadmapping is used and show a more complex relationship between the routine, how it is enacted, and with what intentions and consequences. The performances themselves are related in Table 2, and a summary of the way roadmapping is used in each performance is given here. Performance 2 describes the “roadmap review” portion of a meeting of the Environmental SPC. Almost 40 minutes into the meeting, the time allotted to “roadmap review” had long since come and gone. People were still engaged in discussion of the three different roadmaps that had been presented. The passages show the ambiguity surrounding the use of roadmapping as members of this group strive to emulate an ideal roadmapping routine while acknowledging their actual circumstances and constraints. Participants struggle with the implications of the environmental roadmaps and their creation for the actual authority structure, highlighting how roadmapping both upholds and challenges the social order. For example, one member suggests he is the “wrong” roadmap owner because he doesn’t control many of the technical processes listed on his roadmap document, but he is told how he should manage this within the existing structures for coordination. The performance also illustrates how roadmapping simultaneously serves an organizational goal of reducing uncertainty in environmental planning, and a group goal of enhancing the legitimacy of the Environmental SPC’s actions through its mimicry of Tech’s roadmapping process.

Howard-Grenville: The Role of Agency and Organizational Context

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Organization Science 16(6), pp. 618–636, © 2005 INFORMS

A “Generic” Roadmapping Routine at Chipco

Steps

How steps are enacted

(1) Assess future needs by process step and manufacturing generation.

Existing roadmap document consulted; attention given to the question marks in far-right columns. Emphasis is on anticipating critical issues and gradually resolving uncertainty: “We can’t have active programs [in certain areas] five years out because the technology side hasn’t moved that far; we can only have roadmapping to identify what the future issues will be” (Tech manager and roadmap owner).

(2) Establish goals.

Numerical goals established to replace question marks on roadmap document: “Chipco is a very literal organization where tools and metrics are needed to get things done” (Tech manager). Goals build off existing ones and support higher-level goals: “Chipco managers have calculators that are only capable of multiplying by 0.7” (the factor by which chip feature sizes have to shrink each generation to achieve Moore’s Law) (told to Tech engineer early in his Chipco career). “Our indicators should in most cases be directly in support of higher level [indicators]” (Materials manager).

(3) Make decisions consistent with goals.

Equipment or procedure is selected from among alternatives after careful consideration of data. “A member of the SPC needs to sit down with each work group and go through their analysis and data to make sure its up to spec. Then the full SPC forum is used to report out” (SPC member). In practice, work groups may be told to answer specific questions and gather more data before the SPC decides. “Chipco doesn’t make decisions based on a conjecture about the future. If you say there’s an X% chance of something happening, the [SPC] would say ‘come back when you know for sure’ ” (Tech manager).

(4) Ratify decisions.

SPC members must all ratify a decision. Dissenters must “disagree and commit” to support the decision. “Everyone needs to agree on a decision. That’s why we need the formalism associated with decision making” (Tech manager). “People who come to the [SPC] must have the authority to make a decision at the meeting. They shouldn’t have to go back and check with others in their organization” (Comment on process at Environmental SPC meeting).

(5) Publish and communicate new roadmap.

Roadmap elements get passed down to the groups who need them, entire document typically not circulated widely. “Are permits being negotiated that are in conflict with the roadmap? If so, we need to develop a method to translate the roadmap to all sites, specifically the EHS and Facilities employees who are actually doing the work” (Environmental SPC member).

(6) Execute the roadmap.

Once on a roadmap, a decision is considered POR and engineers work to accept the equipment from the supplier, and/or get procedures operating to specification. “We can’t challenge POR on this selection; our job is to figure out how to make it work” (Manager reflecting on equip. problem).

(7) Challenge the roadmap if necessary.

Changes permitted only after extensive data collection, preparation of “white papers,” and ratification by multiple bodies. “The whole virtual factory has to agree on [a change]. When something is POR it’s impossible to change it” (Tech engineer). A Tech engineer, commenting on the implementation of a change that “was perpetually 12 weeks away,” noted that the white paper was in its 10th revision and had passed through 12 review and approval boards.

Performance 3 takes place shortly after Chipco’s executive management called for aggressive cost-cutting in response to heightened competition. Instead of engaging the routine tentatively, as in Performance 2, the Environmental SPC now uses roadmapping assertively to defend an earlier decision (uphold “POR”) and protect it from cost-cutting. The expectation that decisions are supported by data (not “subjective” analysis) is invoked and upheld, and the social order that places SPC members in control of key roadmap decisions that affect fab operations is drawn on. In the fourth performance, roadmapping is enacted in a different way. Rather than engage directly in one of the

steps of roadmapping shown in Table 1, the managers in this example imagine a new use for the routine and reflect on how they will invoke it. In response to a presentation on strategic, long-range issues, an executive staff member calls for the development of a “water roadmap.” The statement made that developing a water roadmap is “a five to seven year AR” (Action Required, or “deliverable”) reflects the expectation that the water roadmap will have to extend farther into the future than most roadmaps, and its time scale will be governed by the construction of new fabs, not necessarily by the introduction of new manufacturing process generations. Furthermore, while it had remained unsaid


Table 2

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Roadmapping Performances

Performance 2: Environmental roadmaps Setting: “Roadmap review” portion of Environmental SPC meeting. “Why are there question marks on your roadmap?” Jeff demanded of Dave. Rick, the chair of the meeting and a relatively senior manager, answered for Dave, who represented the manufacturing fabs. “We’re trying to emulate the roadmap process of the equipment SPCs (in Tech).” Dave then expressed his reservations about the fact that there were aspects of his roadmap that were outside his realm of authority. “[Am I] the right owner of this roadmap, given that there are processes on here that the fab isn’t doing yet?” he asked. Jack, another manager, sought further clarification, “Is the purpose of this to look at future plans overall or to track how the fabs differ from each other?” Rick again referred to the longer-established Tech roadmaps. “If you look at the equipment SPC roadmaps, they have a lot of information, including things like metrology, external research, etc. We need something that captures all of the environmental issues. Maybe there’s a way to combine the Facilities roadmap and Dave’s roadmap.” A discussion ensued about how the roadmaps would reflect existing and planned procedures and equipment, how exceptions and changes would be handled, and the role of the Environmental SPC and other management bodies in handling them. “Can Rick document this in the minutes?” asked Jack, “Because there is a lot of confusion.” Rick reiterated that most of Dave’s fab problems would be managed by the JEM (Joint Engineering Management meetings for the fabs), but if changes to the roadmap were needed they would have to come back to the Environmental SPC. He also described the kind of roadmap he wanted the group to work toward. A detailed roadmap should be created that included environmental treatment specifications for all of the process equipment, but there would also be a high-level roadmap of the numerical environmental goals for Chipco as a whole. Rick remarked that “We’ve generated more ARs (Action Required) than ever before in a roadmap discussion, but it’s a good thing because of the level of confusion of who’s doing what.”

Roadmapping is used to communicate and coordinate elements of three different roadmaps (Steps 5 and 1 in “generic” routine).

as well as question and clarify both the form and purpose of roadmapping documents, clarifying authority structures, and formally establishing the group’s expertise.

and mimic an exemplary roadmapping process in order to legitimate the group’s activities.

Performance 3: Cost cutting and POR During the time of my field work, Chipco began responding to new market forces. Chipco had been accustomed to introducing high-performance, high-price chips and cutting prices on older offerings (a process referred to as “waterfalling”) as a given chip product moved from the high end to the low end over a period of a few years. As competition on the basis of price intensified, Chipco had initially responded by slashing prices earlier on high-end chips. Chipco’s CEO summed up the problem the company now faced: “it’s very hard to have the product you were advertising on TV as the best thing since sliced cheese in January as something that is obsolete or almost obsolete at the end of the year.” Chipco adopted a new strategy to develop chips targeted to specific market segments, including lower-priced chips that were less costly to produce. To contain costs while this transition was occurring, a call came, roughly in the middle of my fieldwork period, for the manufacturing and technology development groups to cut a significant portion of their combined budgets for the year. All employees were encouraged to adopt a cost-cutting mindset; travel was restricted, meetings normally held face-to-face were held by teleconference, and barely a week went by without an employee being praised in a manager’s weekly report for cutting costs in innovative ways, for example, by trading in a nationwide pager for a local one. One manager observed that the fab management was “questioning everything that doesn’t touch a wafer and whether it is really necessary to spend money on it.” Wafers are the substrates on which chips are made and this comment reflects the general sense that anything which might reduce the performance of the manufacturing process, or the process under development, was generally not meddled with; everything else, however, was open to reconsideration in these circumstances. The Environmental SPC had called for suggestions for cost-cutting and one engineer from a manufacturing fab had put together a presentation to push for delaying or abandoning implementation of a planned factory improvement. This improvement project had been put on the roadmap after much data collection and debate. It was not a change required for compliance with environmental regulation, rather it was a project to recycle a chemical that was used in large quantities. Despite the appeal of cutting costs, the request to abandon the improvement was met with a barrage of criticism by the managers considering the proposal. “I flat out don’t support each factory coming in and saying they don’t want to do things,” said one manager. “That decision is POR and it can’t be changed just because one fab objects to it,” observed another. “Frankly,” added the first manager, “the analysis looks pretty subjective.” It was determined that the proposal was not sufficiently sound to demand a reconsideration of the roadmap.

defend a prior decision (Step 7 in the “generic” routine), and maintain or assert authority structures.

uphold the standards inherent in roadmapping (e.g., for data, consistency between fabs, etc.).


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(cont’d.)

Performance 4: Water roadmap

Roadmapping is used to

The group I participated in, EnviroTech, spent several months putting together the first version of an environmental SLRP (Strategic Long-Range Plan) for Chipco. A SLRP differs from a roadmap in that it pulls together trends and data on a range of issues, rather than presenting the details of decisions that have been made. The SLRP was presented by Stu, an EnviroTech manager, to a number of senior managers, including a member of Chipco’s executive staff who reported directly to the CEO. At this meeting, the first agenda item regarded anticipated new legislation that would lower the limits of certain air emissions. Stu called attention to the fact that this might fundamentally alter Chipco’s approach to handling its air emissions. This topic was considered the most important by Stu and others who had prepared the SLRP. After discussing several other types of air emissions, Stu introduced the topic of water use. He noted that when the last manufacturing fab was being planned, 15 out of 20 sites that were considered were rejected because of water availability. “Some cities told us outright that they didn’t even want to talk to us because they’d heard how much water we use,” Stu claimed. Although data showed that Chipco was “among the best” in raw water used per wafer, he added, the problem is largely a public affairs problem because “we are tagged as water hogs and we can’t shake that image.” After more discussion of the issue and the possible technical approaches, the executive staff member asked, “do we know what it takes so that water availability does not limit fab site selection?” He added, “air emissions don’t feel like a showstopper.” Rick, another manager responsible for the SLRP, noted that he was “going to flesh out on Monday a whole range of actions on [the specific type of air emissions].” “It sounds like we need a similar kind of roadmap on water,” the executive staff member added. “This is a five-to-seven-year AR because [water consumption] matters when we go out and look for future factory sites,” noted Rick. In debriefing my group after the meeting, Stu admitted he was surprised that water had taken on such importance in the meeting. “Its our number one gap,” he now claimed, and he had already scheduled a meeting with the facilities technology development group to “go fix it.” Stu explained that, although the new air emissions limits posed a bigger problem, the executive staff member had “had his growth hat on” and the fact that 15 of 20 sites were rejected because of water consumption had “fixed in his mind.”

at this meeting, the development of a companywide water roadmap would have to accommodate existing and anticipated site-specific differences in water supply quality and discharge regulations. As the other performances demonstrate, roadmaps are supposed to establish one set of criteria for all manufacturing fabs to adhere to. Thus, developing a water roadmap would involve considerable adaptation to accommodate these departures from the typical uses of roadmapping.

Roadmapping as Flexible yet Persistent

None of the performances show the roadmapping routine being enacted habitually at Chipco as a simple iteration of past performances. In each case, actors evaluate the situation they are in and judge which aspects of roadmapping to invoke, and how to invoke them. There is significant variety in the situations encountered, the level of experience actors have with the roadmapping routine, their aspirations for and interpretations of the routine, and the outcomes that come about from their use of the routine. Under such circumstances, we may well expect that the routine would change continuously over time (Feldman 2000), but it did not. Indeed, roadmapping retained a recognizable form and was central to work at Chipco, even outside Tech and EnviroTech. Roadmapping was performed for activities as

communicate future issues and set goals and approaches.

create or claim group ownership of a particular problem. maintain and assert authority structures.

diverse as materials planning, product development, and even “people development.” As one environmental manager commented, “the way [Chipco] normally works is we define a numeric metric and fix on it and work towards it.” A Tech manager explained, “[Chipco] tends to focus on things that limit performance, the whole corporate psyche is around problem-solving.” Roadmapping was inseparable from these activities, it was not an isolated routine, but one that appeared deeply embedded in Chipco’s culture. Before considering why it was both persistent and pervasive, I consider the factors that shaped the flexible use of roadmapping. Factors Contributing to the Flexible Use of Roadmapping Several factors emerge from the data to explain why the roadmapping routine is enacted differently at different times at Chipco. First, the routine appears to serve multiple ends for individuals, groups, and the organization as a whole, reflecting the diverse intentions of those who use it. Second, people approach the routine with different orientations toward the past, present, and future. And finally, the artifacts and social expectations generated from prior uses of the routine are flexible enough to be tailored to fit new situations or new intentions.


Actors’ Intentions. The data show roadmapping being used, even within a given performance, for multiple ends simultaneously. These ends differ with the individual and collective intentions of the actors involved. As shown in the final column of Table 2, roadmapping enables groups to set performance goals, facilitates communication, draws on and reinforces the social order, establishes expertise and boundaries of activity, enforces standards for performance of activities, and legitimates the actions of groups. In different situations, one or more of these concerns or activities may be more important than the others, influencing how the routine will be enacted. For example, while the same group used the routine in Performances 2 and 3, they put it to different uses. In Performance 2, the SPC questioned their own use of roadmapping in an effort to clarify and, ultimately, improve their use of the routine. However, in Performance 3, when a prior decision was questioned, the same group was much less open to change and used the opportunity to assert their authority and expertise in the use of the routine. Also, different individuals may consider different ends to be important as they enact portions of a routine. For example, in Performance 2 we see a group pursuing a goal of coordinating their activities, and, at the same time, an individual (Rick) pursuing a goal of ensuring his SPC gained experience with roadmapping. This observation supports the claim that even an abstract and presumed collective understanding of a routine is not invariable because actors’ understandings of a routine will vary with their role and perspective (Dougherty 1992, Feldman and Pentland 2003). More broadly, we can see any activity that is engaged by different people at different times as having both an abstract, ostensive aspect, and a “personally ordered and edited” (Lave 1988, p. 151) aspect that makes sense only to the individual in that setting. Actors’ Orientations. Related to the observation that people put the routine to multiple different uses is the observation that they also approached it with different orientations. The data suggest that the intentions of the actors and their experience with roadmapping influenced how they enacted the routine in a given situation and at a given time. Recent work on agency transcends the simple notion that actors are either mindful or mindless in their actions, and asserts that they simultaneously draw from the past (habit, prior experiences, interpretive schemes), the present (situation-at-hand, resources and artifacts available), and the future (projections, expectations, norms that inform ongoing practice) to inform their current practice (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). Actors may appear to be more or less mindful because one of these three orientations typically takes the foreground while others recede to the background in a given situation.

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For example, Katherine’s use of roadmapping comes closest to iterating on past performances, but it also encapsulates an orientation towards the future (aspiration that they get on to ramp + 3 decisions) and a pragmatic orientation towards the present (recognition that the ramp + 1 decisions must be made because, as one Tech engineer put it, “if there’s no new process, there’s no Chipco”). Katherine’s orientation may also reflect her experience with, confidence in, and comfort with the outcomes of the routine. In contrast, the individuals in Performance 2 seem to be primarily oriented to the present as they engage the routine pragmatically and deliberatively, responding to the situation at hand, but also drawing from other’s past roadmapping enactments (exemplary roadmap documents) and their aspirations (that they become/are regarded as more competent at roadmapping). In Performance 4, the executive staff member is clearly primarily oriented to the future, imaging new outcomes for the roadmapping process and projecting a vision of a water roadmap. Again, as the enactment of a routine involves many people, their collective, not merely individual, orientations are consequential. If individual orientations differ, we may see contests over the use of routines. One person may want to use a routine iteratively, while another may wish to apply it pragmatically, or another projectively. In cases like Performances 1 and 4, where a relatively senior manager with substantial roadmapping experience explicitly stated his or her intentions for the routine, it is likely that the debate over its use will be minimized. However, in situations like Performance 2, where people have varying levels of experience and comfort with the routine, we see the relationship between the pragmatic and projective uses of the routine being overtly contested. Artifacts and Expectations. The final explanation for the flexible use of roadmapping is that the artifacts and social expectations generated by the routine are inherently somewhat flexible and while they inform how roadmapping is enacted, they do not determine it. Roadmap documents are flexible artifacts because they are tailored to the concerns of a particular process area and may center more on equipment or more on process “recipes” or specifications. Even social expectations, like the assumption that something on a roadmap (POR) is impossible to change, are not inviolable. Of course, the individual’s orientation and position are important here too. The call for a water roadmap, which implied a more significant departure from the norm than usual, was taken seriously when issued by an executive staff member, but likely would not have received the same response if issued by a junior engineer. Factors Contributing to the Persistent Use of Roadmapping Many of the reasons given for the persistence of routines—that they simplify choice (March and Simon

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1958), become habitual (Ashforth and Fried 1998), or suppress deliberation in novel circumstances (Staw et al. 1981, Gersick and Hackman 1990)—fail to adequately account for how roadmapping is used at Chipco. These explanations do not allow for a routine being used for reasons other than its intended purpose, nor do they allow for considering differences between the actors using a routine and the consequences of these differences for a routine’s performance. The data show that the very factors that contribute to its flexibility also contribute to the persistence of the roadmapping routine. First, the many intentions served—organizational, group, and individual—by a routine make it possible for the perpetuation of a routine to be in the interest of groups and individuals even if they are indifferent to the routine’s primary organizational goal. Second, the different orientations actors have towards a routine mean that even a practical or projective use of the routine can result in its deliberate use, and, finally, the artifacts and expectations produced by the use of the routine endure and can shape subsequent performances. Actors’ Intentions. Precisely because routines allow actors to pursue multiple different ends, they are recreated and reinforced in many ways. Actions need not be motivated or performed identically to nonetheless recreate social structures and expectations (Giddens 1993, Orlikowski 2000). When a routine is used deliberately, in response to multiple individual and group intentions, it is perpetuated. Deliberate execution of a routine, however, is quite different from its habitual use, but both may result in the persistence of the routine over time. In Performance 2 we have already seen that roadmapping served many different ends, with the overall result that each actor or group of actors chose to use the routine, and hence reproduced it. The Environmental SPC wanted to use roadmapping in Performance 2 because it served to legitimate their actions in the eyes of Tech (recall that Katherine blamed members earlier when a problem that affected her SPC had not been properly roadmapped by the Environmental SPC). Beyond mere impression management, however, the SPC’s use of roadmapping also served to coordinate disparate activities, clarify who was responsible for what, and, quite literally, get everyone on the “same page.” Rick, the SPC chair, had made it quite clear from other discussions that his personal goal was to improve the effectiveness of the SPC by increased attention to roadmapping. It is not incidental to this story that Rick was shortly thereafter promoted to a prominent position within the Tech group (he remained the chair of the Environmental SPC). Actors’ Orientations. When we account for the fact that actors have different orientations towards routine performances, we see further the multiple ways routines may be perpetuated. If we see routines only as relatively


prescribed sets of actions executed in a set sequence, we miss a great many of the enactments of routines— for example, when actors use them to imagine or frame future actions, or when they “dip into” aspects of routines without executing an entire sequence—that enmesh them so fully in organizational life. Accounting for the orientation of actors allows for their personal and political motivations to enter into the explanation for why routines are persistent. Performance 4, for example, is not a case of iteratively executing a routine by performing one or more of its steps, but it is a case of invoking the roadmapping routine and projecting expectations about its performance to the future. This type of projective enactment also serves to reinforce the routine as it draws on the notion that roadmapping is an appropriate and essential way to address a gap in planning. Artifacts and Expectations. Artifacts, including roadmap documents, POR equipment, and process specifications, and even SPCs themselves, can constrain subsequent roadmapping performances because they persist over time and can be transferred between individuals and from one situation to another. For example, one rule of thumb in operation at Chipco is that 70% of the process equipment must be reused from one generation to the next, so, in the process of roadmapping, groups must accommodate the use of existing equipment as they plan for new process modules, specifications, and interfacing equipment. Existing artifacts need not be a constraint. They are also enablers. For example, roadmap goals are almost always built off the specifications achieved by existing process modules and equipment, simplifying search somewhat. Artifacts also cue representations or schemas that can guide action just as strongly as the concrete aspects of artifacts do (Narduzzo et al. 2000, Hargadon and Douglas 2001). Prior enactments also generate social expectations (e.g., what POR means, what roadmap ownership implies, how roadmap goals are generated, what ratification implies) that persist over time. Social expectations provide answers to questions of who performs a routine, what comprises the routine, and how, why, and where it is performed (Yates and Orlikowski 2002). While some routines may have written instructions to provide these answers, there will always be unwritten social expectations that actors will need to be familiar with in order to competently use the routine. Given the list of roadmapping steps defined in the first column of Table 1, it is unlikely a newcomer to Chipco could engage the routine appropriately or effectively. The information in the second column of the table starts to fill in some of the social expectations associated with the routine’s performance. Only with this additional information can an actor understand the social import of the generic set of roadmapping steps and respect and respond to triggers of roadmapping performances.


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Artifacts and social expectations may be separable only conceptually as they are often tightly bound together in routine performance. For example, in Performance 3 the Environmental SPC’s decision on the recycle project was an artifact (an entry on a roadmap), which also carried strong social expectations that it would not be changed just because one fab objected. In the absence of the artifact and the expectations produced by roadmapping, the proposal to reconsider the project in an environment of cost-cutting may have been treated quite differently.

A Model of Flexible yet Persistent Routines

Figure 1 brings together the factors identified so far that contribute to flexible routine performances and the persistence of the routine over time. It depicts how routines are enacted in response to the intentions and orientations of individual actors, which in turn are informed by the situation at hand and the artifacts and social expectations generated from prior enactments of the routine. Actors may choose to iterate on earlier performances, to apply elements of earlier performances pragmatically as they simultaneously pursue multiple ends, or to project elements of earlier performances to plan for or imagine future enactments of the routine. Iterating implies a primary orientation to the past, applying a primary orientation to the present, and projecting a primary orientation to the future. Each enactment of the routine produces artifacts and recreates or revises social expectations, which can influence subsequent enactments. Seen in this way, the routine is not a permanent, independent entity, but is an ongoing accomplishment of the actors who engage it. In this sense, routines are structures as structurationists define them; they exist as instantiations Figure 1

of practices and are recreated or revised with each enactment (Giddens 1984, Orlikowski 1992, Barley and Tolbert 1997). The dashed lines in Figure 1 outline the ostensive and performative aspects of a routine (Feldman and Pentland 2003). The artifacts and social expectations contribute to abstract, idealized understandings of the routine, its ostensive aspect; while the performances shown on the right side of Figure 1 constitute the performative aspect of the routine. The model shows how actors’ intentions and orientations link the two aspects. Individual actors have certain intentions and orientations towards the routine; each has a particular understanding of the artifacts and social expectations (Lave 1988), and each has an orientation primarily toward the past, present, or future (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). However, routines are, by definition, collectively enacted. The possibly varied intentions and orientations of individual actors come together in particular routine performances. The Chipco data suggest that individuals and groups differ in their ability to realize their intentions through the collective enactment of a routine; such differences may turn on the relative power and social skill (Fligstein 2001) of the actors involved. In other words, some actors may be more effective than others in shaping the collective use of a routine. Furthermore, routine performances may come off as collective acts, but only through a process of tacit or even overt contestation and negotiation by participants. I take up these themes more fully in the discussion, and turn now to exploring a final factor that contributes to the persistence of routines over time. The Embeddedness of Routines The model and analysis so far draw attention to particular performances of a routine, without explicitly

A Model of Flexible yet Persistent Routines

Actor’s intentions

Situation at hand Presents opportunities for pursuit of multiple and varied ends

Artifacts and social expectations Produced by prior enactments of routine

Informs

Inform

• What ends are sought? Actor’s intentions • How do artifacts and social • What ends are sought? expectations from prior enactments Actor’s intentions • How artifacts andorsocial of do routine enable constrain • What ends are sought? expectations from ends? prior enactments pursuit of these • How doofartifacts and social routine enable or constrain Actor’s orientation expectations priorends? enactments pursuitfrom of these of routine enable constrain Actor’s orientation • Iterate –or rely heavily on artifacts pursuit ofand these ends? social expectations as a guide •Actor’s heavily on artifacts •Iterate Apply–orientation –rely pragmatically adapt andartifacts social expectations as a guide Choice taken to: and expectations to • Apply – pragmatically adapt • Iterate – respond rely heavily on artifacts to situation at hand and expectations to new uses and social expectations as a or guide •artifacts Project – imagine plan to situation of routine • Apply –respond pragmatically adaptat hand • Project – imagine or artifacts and expectations to plan new uses respondoftoroutine situation at hand

• Project – imagine or plan new uses of routine

Recreate or revise

Collective performance of routine

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considering the routine in the broader organizational context. However, when we see routines as structures, that is, instantiated through ongoing practice, it becomes apparent that the practices that constitute routines also constitute other aspects of the organization. Routines are never enacted in a vacuum (Narduzzo et al. 2000, Feldman 2003), but are enacted simultaneously with other structures, including technological structures, hierarchical structures, and broader normative structures of the organization (Dougherty 1992, DeSanctis and Poole 1994, Orlikowski 2000). The artifacts and social expectations generated from enacting these other structures can overlap with and reinforce those that inform the enactment of routines. In other words, the multiple structures operating within an organization may “operate in harmony or may have conflicting claims and empowerments” (Sewell 1992, p. 16). The Chipco data are valuable in illustrating how the broader organizational context contributes to the persistence of a routine, and in this section I draw on the larger cultural analysis of Tech and EnviroTech to augment the data on the roadmapping routine. Perhaps the most compelling reason for the persistence of the roadmapping routine at Chipco is the fact that it is so tightly coupled to other activity that is regarded as central to what Chipco does (“define a numeric metric and fix on it and work towards it”). The practice of roadmapping, within Tech in particular, is bound up with what Pentland (1995) refers to as technological, coordination, and cultural structures. Technological structures result from the physical properties of technical artifacts, and they guide and constrain the actions of users or creators of the artifacts (Orlikowski 1992, DeSanctis and Poole 1994). Coordination structures reflect the interdependence of action between multiple actors when accomplishing a complex task. Cultural structures reflect norms of appropriate behavior that enable and constrain particular types and sequences of action (Pentland 1995). Like routines, these other structures exist only as ongoing accomplishments of the organization’s members. Technological Structures. Roadmapping is perhaps most strongly reflective of the technological structures generated by chip manufacturing. One of the basic features of the technology used to manufacture chips is that it can be scaled, meaning that the physical dimensions of the millions of components of a chip are literally shrunk. This is achieved by replacing equipment used in the chip-making process and/or developing new process approaches that are capable of creating smaller chip features. Scalability means that technology development in this industry is less a creative search process than a series of incremental (yet significant in their difficulty of implementation) process design changes. An important expectation that emerges from the scalability of the manufacturing technology is Moore’s Law, the prediction that features on a chip will shrink in size by half


roughly every two years. Chipco engineers have confidence in their ability to overcome technical barriers to continue to keep pace with Moore’s Law. One noted, “at every turn in my career people have said there’s a hard limit here and it hasn’t turned out to be true.” The artifacts (a new manufacturing process every two years) and expectations (that Moore’s Law will be adhered to in the future) generated by enacting the technological structures of chip manufacturing reinforce the roadmapping routine by giving it both pacing and predictability. The time scale shown on roadmap documents reflects the assumed adherence to Moore’s Law, and goals established during roadmapping are set to meet the scaling prediction. Furthermore, the semiconductor manufacturing process is divisible into hundreds of discrete steps (e.g., clean, pattern, etch, polish, etc.) that are performed sequentially, meaning that development of the steps can occur in parallel with little need for coordination beyond high-level agreement on specifications and tolerances to be achieved by each step. A new manufacturing process generation therefore represents the sum of a large number of individual development efforts on discrete process steps. The existence of multiple roadmaps for different process areas, and higher-level “roll-up” roadmaps, is a direct reflection of the divisibility of the manufacturing process. Coordination Structures. Roadmapping in Tech is also strongly related to the social order. Roadmap ownership and even the process of negotiating what is on and off a roadmap serves to delineate responsibility within the organization. Serving on an SPC is reserved for those who have the authority to “drive the decisions in their own organizations,” as Katherine noted. Even an engineer’s association with a POR piece of equipment connotes status; “he’s the tool owner for the POR litho tool for process [XXX]” serves as enough of an introduction. Work in Tech is highly specialized around roles and little direct interaction between roles occurs except at the level of managers (roadmap owners). For example, a litho (lithography) engineer who works on a certain layer may have little or no work-related interaction with another litho engineer who works on a different chip layer, or with a polish engineer who works on the same chip layer. One Tech engineer commented that he and his peers “all have their blinders on” so they can focus exclusively on their part of the process. This aspect of the organization of work directly mirrors the technical divisibility of the manufacturing process itself, and its artifacts and expectations also influence who performs roadmapping and how it is performed. Cultural Structures. Cultural structures also generate artifacts and expectations that influence roadmapping. In Chipco’s broader culture actions are data driven, work must achieve a predetermined goal, focus and discipline


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Figure 2

A Model of Embedded Routines

Actor’s intentions Actor’s intentions Situation at hand

Informs

Actor’s intentions Actor’s orientation Actor’s orientation Actor’s orientation

Inform

Artifacts and and socialArtifacts expectations and socialArtifacts expectations Artifacts and social expectations social expectations

Multiple artifacts and expectations • Aligned or competing? and • How many? • Of what type?

Collective Enactment of performance Enactment of other of routine Enactment of other structure other structure structure

Simultaneous enactment of multiple structures • How many? • Of what type?

Recreate or revise

are rewarded, and uncertainty is dealt with by sticking to a plan. Artifacts like the cards imprinted with Chipco’s values (“Results Orientation, Discipline, Quality, and Customer Orientation”), designed to attach to employee badges, and expectations expressed through encounters like mine with a manager who derided me for having workplan goals that were “vague and unmeasurable,” reflect and shape the norms that guide all action, including roadmapping, at Chipco. An intolerance for work that appears insufficiently goal-oriented is reflected in Katherine’s need to know my work objectives before engaging in conversation, and her frustration with the problem that “just came along from somewhere.” In areas like materials management and people development, where technological and coordination structures do not so closely fit the practices of roadmapping, these cultural norms nonetheless are prevalent and serve to reinforce the use of roadmapping. Embeddedness. The simultaneous enactment of multiple structures can contribute to the persistence of routines by generating multiple, often overlapping artifacts and expectations. I define the overlap between artifacts and expectations generated from routine performances and those generated from the enactment of other structures as a routine’s embeddedness in other organizational structures. The data suggest three dimensions that may characterize the embeddedness of a routine: • First, to what extent does the enactment of the routine overlap with the enactment of other structures? Simply put, what number of other structures are implicated when a routine is enacted? • Second, what types of structures does the routine overlap with? For example, does a routine performance draw on technological structures, or structures of control

and coordination, whose characteristics might differently shape a routine performance? • Finally, to what extent are the artifacts and expectations of each of these overlapping structures aligned? Or do they set up competing claims? Figure 2 shows how the model from Figure 1 is altered when a routine’s embeddedness is considered. Shown on the left-hand side of Figure 2, multiple artifacts and expectations generated from the enactment of other structures may inform an actor’s intentions and orientation towards a routine. For example, the existence of so many roadmap documents delineated by technology generation (i.e., major technical upgrades every two years) may shape how a new group envisions its use of roadmapping. Important here is the extent to which artifacts and expectations either reinforce each other or are in conflict with each other, as well as simply the number and type of artifacts and expectations generated by other structures. Shown on the right-hand side of the figure are the other structures enacted simultaneously with a given roadmap performance. Important here are the number and type of other structures that accompany roadmapping performances, and subsequently the number and type of artifacts and expectations they produce.

Discussion and Implications

The view of organizational routines developed here preserves the basic ideas that routines are interrelated sequences of actions performed by multiple actors (Nelson and Winter 1982, Cohen and Bacdayan 1994) and that they serve as mechanisms for coping with complexity (Cyert and March 1963, Nelson and Winter 1982), but it departs radically from the idea that routines produce “a fixed response to defined stimuli” (March and Simon 1958, p. 142). In fact, building on recent

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work (Feldman 2000, Feldman and Pentland 2003), this model of routines rejects the idea that a routine is in any way a formulaic connection of stimuli and responses, for such an image has no role for the actors doing the responding nor for the organizational context in which the responses (and stimuli) arise. By attending to agency and organizational context in the performance of a routine, I have developed a model that explains and allows for both the flexible and inflexible use of routines, and both their change or persistence over time. In this section I unpack the ideas of embeddedness and agency to explore their implications further and to suggest some answers to questions raised in the opening of the paper. If routines can be stable or changing under a variety of conditions, what must we know about the use of a routine in order to understand its organizational consequences? In other words, what factors do we need to account for to understand the prominence and persistence (or lack thereof) of particular routines in organizational life? Embedded Routines and Change Over Time The degree to which a routine is embedded in other organizational structures may influence how flexibly it is used, and, more importantly, will likely shape the ongoing consequences of its flexible use. A strongly embedded routine, one that overlaps with many other structures, whose overlap is significant in the sense that a change in the enactment of one type of structure would be consequential for the others, and whose artifacts and expectations are reinforced by those generated by other structures, may be quite difficult to change over time. For example, Feldman (2003) shows that a change in a routine that is requested by supervisors fails to take hold when its performance contradicts employees’ understandings about the organization. Using the language of embeddedness, the old routine in that case appears strongly embedded in the old coordination and cultural structures that continue to be reproduced by some of the supervisors’ actions and by subordinates’ understandings of supervisor-supervisor and supervisorsubordinate interactions (Feldman 2003). Even in the absence of a requested change to a strongly embedded routine, flexible performances could still produce varied artifacts and expectations. However, these new artifacts and expectations would likely be insignificant compared to the accumulation of reinforcing artifacts and expectations produced by the other structures. In other words, exceptions would remain exceptions, rather than developing into rules. In contrast, a weakly embedded routine is characterized as one that does not overlap with many or any other structures; its overlap, if present, would be somewhat arbitrary, so a change in the enactment of one type of structure would be relatively inconsequential for the others; and/or the artifacts and expectations generated


might actually be contradictory to those of other structures. Gersick and Hackman (1990, p. 91) distinguish between routines that are central versus peripheral to a group’s work—the steps taken by an aircraft crew to prepare for landing is among the former, while a routine shaping when uniform hats are removed and where they are hung in the cockpit is among the latter. The more peripheral a group’s routine, they argue, the easier it is to change over time (Gersick and Hackman 1990). In the language of embeddedness, the pattern of actions that involve hanging hats in the cockpit may invoke few, if any, other structures (except perhaps structures of coordination and control if seniority and hat-hanging preference are importantly linked), and the consequences of a departure from the norm would have little impact on these other structures. Flexible performances of weakly embedded routines thus are more likely than those of strongly embedded routines to produce artifacts and expectations that are unproblematically perpetuated, possibly leading to a change in the routine over time. If we were to animate Figure 2 and explicitly consider what happens over multiple performances of a routine, the effects of strong or weak embeddedness become clear. The expected outcomes in terms of flexibility of the routine within and between individual performances, and the change of the routine over time are shown in Table 3 for various combinations of embeddedness and actors’ orientations. To simplify, the table includes only the actors’ orientation (not intentions) and shows routines as either strongly or weakly embedded. Recall that actors may be primarily oriented to the past, present, or future in any routine performance, and may choose, respectively, to iterate on earlier performances, to apply elements of earlier performances pragmatically as they simultaneously pursue multiple ends, or to project elements of earlier performances to plan for or imagine future enactments of the routine. The final column shows the range of possible outcomes in terms of how the ostensive aspect of the routine (Feldman and Pentland 2003), that is, abstract, idealized understanding of what constitutes the routine, might change or persist over time. A key message from the table is that while there are many combinations of embeddedness and agency that produce flexible individual routine performances, there are relatively fewer that produce likely change in the routine over time. The various combinations of embeddedness and agency can start to explain the wide variety of routines we see addressed in the literature—from routines that appear as habitually enacted and resistant to change over time even in the face of new conditions (Gersick and Hackman 1990, Edmondson et al. 2001) to those that are both flexible and broadly adjustable over time (Adler et al. 1999, Knott 2001, Zollo and Winter 2002). The former might be those labeled “sticky” routines in Table 3, the latter “adaptive” or “pervasive.”4 In each


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Table 3

Embeddedness, Agency, and Characteristics of Routines in Use

Embeddedness of routine Weak • Overlaps with few other structures. • Overlap is relatively insignificant. • Competing artifacts and expectations.

Strong • Overlaps with many other structures. • Overlap is significant and consequential. • Reinforcing artifacts and expectations.

Actors’ primary orientation To Past (Iterate)

Flexible routine performances? Unlikely

Changes in routine over time? Unlikely

To Present (Apply)

Likely

Somewhat likely

To Future (Project)

Likely

Likely

To Past (Iterate)

Unlikely

Very unlikely

To Present (Apply)

Likely

Unlikely

To Future (Project)

Likely

Somewhat unlikely

case, the possibility always exists that the routine is performed flexibly, and that it either intentionally or unintentionally changes over time. However, in each case the embeddedness of the routine in other structures, and the orientations of those who use the routine, critically shape how those possibilities unfold. Equally critical, and not represented in Table 3, is the fact that a routine is a collective performance. As the Chipco data show, the many actors involved may not have similar orientations towards a routine, with some enacting it iteratively, others pragmatically adjusting it to a given situation, and others imagining new uses for it. These orientations may coexist even within a single performance of a routine. As a result, the “pure” types shown in the final column of Table 3 might show up only infrequently in practice. Furthermore, some types might be more prevalent than others. For example, if only one or a few individuals are oriented to apply or project aspects of a routine performance, this may nonetheless introduce variations, opening up the possibility of ongoing change. Or, one individual’s use of a routine may strongly shape other’s uses of it, or subsequent uses of it. This again raises the importance of individual agency, and the observation that all agents are not equally powerful, an implication that is taken up more fully below. Finally, the degree of a routine’s embeddedness and actors’ orientations towards a routine performance are not independent of each other. Both the strength and nature of a routine’s embeddedness will tend to inform actors’ orientations. For example, relatively fewer actors may consider projective—future-oriented— uses of a strongly embedded routine, and relatively more

Routine label and characteristics over time Arbitrary Routine: Changes only as a result of intentional redesign, or unintended slippage. Pragmatic Routine: Changes readily as a result of emergent variation; responsive to shifts in situation at hand. Adaptive Routine: Relatively easily adapted to new uses; many variants may coexist simultaneously. Sticky Routine: Very persistent; little impetus or change from within. Accomodative Routine: Permits flexible use to pragmatically apply to situation at hand, but variations rarely perpetuated. Pervasive Routine: Rather than changing over time, routine may “take over” more problem situations and become more widely applied.

consider iterative—past-oriented—uses. If one type of structure is more salient than others when a routine is performed, it may also influence actors’ orientations. For example, at Chipco, technological structures strongly shaped roadmapping performances, but there was a general understanding that technologies, while typically developed iteratively, could on occasion be more radically revised by a breakthrough in a certain process area. Risk taking to develop innovative technologies was valued, and even those focused on incremental improvements were expected, first and foremost, to pragmatically “make it work.” As a result, individuals who experienced roadmapping as primarily embedded in technological structures might be oriented more to apply or project aspects of the routine, as opposed to simply iterate. Conversely, if routines are experienced as primarily embedded in cultural structures or structures of coordination (as in the example from Feldman 2003 given earlier), orientations toward them might be more iterative, as the enactment of these structures tends to draw heavily from the past. Power, Agency, and Embeddedness While a routine’s embeddedness may influence actors’ orientations, it does not close off any possibilities. Individual orientations and intentions still show up in particular routine performances, but when do these produce change over time in the routine? Table 3 does not give the full answer, for it does not account explicitly for the power of agents. Indeed, agency differs considerably between individuals (Sewell 1992), and some are

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able to “turn exceptions into rules,” while others are not (Feldman and Pentland 2003, p. 110). The Chipco data demonstrate that the relative power and position of those who engage routines, as well as their experience with, confidence in, and intentions for the routines, clearly influence the routine’s actual use. While the data do not fully capture how any given performance altered the routine over time, they do suggest some connections between power, agency, and embeddedness that could be explored further. Clearly, the more strongly embedded a routine is in other structures, the greater command an individual must have over these structures in order to produce change over time. However, the type of structures in which the routine is embedded matters, as does the type of power exercised by the individual. Power is defined as the capacity to mobilize resources (Giddens 1984, Sewell 1992), and mobilizing resources has been defined as “the creation in practice of assets such as people, time, money, knowledge or skill; and qualities of relationships such as trust, authority, or complementarity such that they enable actors” (Feldman 2004, p. 296). This implies that power accrues from more traditional sources— command over material resources and over people—and more relational sources that depend on the quality of connections between people (Dutton and Heaphy 2003). A routine embedded primarily in technological structures may be altered by those whose power accrues from command over traditional allocative resources (Giddens 1984), like money, knowledge, and technical expertise. Relational resources may also be important, as a network of connections based on respect for skills and expertise can influence the development or adoption of new technologies. In contrast, changing a routine embedded in coordination and/or cultural structures may rely less on allocative resources and more on the exercise of formal or informal authority to reorganize patterns of interaction. However, such reorganizations may threaten existing interests and identities (Carlile 2002, Feldman 2004), suggesting that relational resources like trust may be critical to changing cultural and coordination structures, and the routines embedded in them. Consider the somewhat different resources that are used in maintaining or changing roadmapping for the core Tech activities (which are most strongly embedded in technical, coordination, and cultural structures) and the EnviroTech activities (which were less closely aligned with the technical structures, although strongly embedded in coordination and cultural structures). Katherine’s comments in Performance 1 suggest that allocative resources (knowledge, data), authoritative resources, and relational resources (trust, respect) all come together in the ideal roadmapping performance. Data must be mustered to drive decisions, which are then vested with their own legitimacy (they “mean something” and people trust them). However, this works


hand-in-hand with the authority and relational resources individual members of the SPC hold, as they need to be the kind of people who can “drive the decisions.” Changing roadmapping within Tech would likely involve the mobilization of considerable allocative, authoritative, and relational resources. In contrast, the senior executive in Performance 4 effectively reinterpreted a group’s data—its source of power—but managed to bring the group together around a consensus that water consumption was in fact the “number one gap.” He did not dispute the technical issues or the data itself, but he reframed the problem in a way that reflected his formal authority to set strategic direction (he “had his growth hat on”). In this case, his mobilization of authoritative resources seems most critical. In other settings, the type of structures that shape routine performances and the particular resources needed to alter these structures may be quite different, but in all cases the individuals with greater command over the resources will be better able to change embedded routines over time. Changing routines that are strongly embedded in cultural structures may rely heavily on the use of authoritative and relational resources because they can be used to frame and negotiate, over time, shared meaning, shared norms, and collective identity (Creed et al. 2002, Maguire et al. 2004). Opportunities for Further Study The model developed here draws from close observation of one type of routine in one organization, but suggests that embeddedness and agency may be key factors that shape the flexible use of routines and their change or persistence over time in other settings. Future work could look further at the implications of embeddedness, agency, and power for routine performance and organizational outcomes. Several specific questions are opened up for further study. First, while Table 3 simplifies the construct of embeddedness as either strong or weak, it clearly varies along at least three dimensions (number and type of overlapping structures, and alignment of artifacts and expectations produced by these). How is embeddedness experienced? What are the consequences of embeddedness in different types of structures for a routine’s performances? Is a routine’s embeddedness stable over time, or, if not, what triggers shifts? Second, the constructs of agency and power can be further developed by asking how agency and power influence both intentional and unintentional change over time of routines. What kinds of power produce change in strongly embedded routines? How does the type of structures a routine is embedded in influence the resources that must be mustered to produce change? How do the orientations of multiple agents and their command of different types of resources come together to either produce or resist change to a routine over time? Under what conditions of agency and embeddedness does unintentional change


635


of routines occur? To study any of these questions, a method that permits close observation of routine performances and the context in which they are performed is essential.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have used data from in-depth observation of a high-tech manufacturer to explore the factors that produce flexibility in routine performances and a routine’s persistence or change over time. Chipco’s enactment of the roadmapping routine supports recent work that describes routines not as formulaic actions that connect stimuli and responses, but as ongoing, situated accomplishments. I extend this work by drawing attention to how agency shapes particular routine performances. Actors put organizational routines to work by selecting which aspects of a routine to perform at a given time, and how to perform them. However, this paper argues that these performances can only be understood and evaluated in the larger context of the work itself. Routines are enacted simultaneously with other structures, including technological, coordination, and cultural structures, that generate overlapping artifacts and social expectations. Their embeddedness in these other structures and their deliberate, but not mindless, enactment gives flexible routines persistence over time. Acknowledgments

The author thanks Paul Carlile, Nils Fonstad, Andy Hoffman, Bill Kahn, Wanda Orlikowski, John Van Maanen, participants in the Davis Conference for Qualitative Research, the Work, Technology and Organization Colloquium at Stanford University, Sim Sitkin, and three anonymous reviewers for their help in developing this paper. She is also grateful to a large number of Chipco employees for their participation in this research.

Endnotes 1

Chipco is a pseudonym. All personal names have been changed to protect the identity of individuals, and group names have been disguised. 2 I was employed as a student intern by Chipco, which gave me access to the organization. My role as an intern was to work with the EnviroTech group and analyze their effectiveness at integrating into the Tech development process. The intern role was a natural one from which to conduct participant observation, as I was an accepted, yet temporary, member of the organization and members expected me to observe, question, and learn about their practices. As part of my participant role, I conducted semistructured interviews and analyzed documents to understand four “case studies” that were examples of successful and unsuccessful integration of environmental work with Tech work. I also was involved in several other projects that explicitly addressed this integration. These projects included helping to prepare an environmental longrange strategic plan for Chipco, developing an environmental module for a risk assessment tool, and investigating possible use of computational modeling of environmental impacts. I

attended monthly meetings of Chipco’s Environmental Strategic Planning Council (Environmental SPC), as well as several industrywide meetings and followed closely the programs and projects under consideration and development. Over the course of my time in EnviroTech, I took on a number of new projects opportunistically as my manager or I saw a need for someone to represent our group. This helped to expose me to the broadest possible range of EnviroTech’s activities, and its interactions with Tech and other groups. 3 Roadmap documents, referred to simply as “roadmaps,” varied quite considerably to reflect the particular process steps, equipment, or process-related issues the owner was responsible for, but a typical form consisted of a time series running horizontally across the top of the page, and the necessary categories (for example, specific substeps of the manufacturing process) running vertically down the left-hand side. The table was filled in with details of the relevant process specifications and/or equipment. The units used to demark time on roadmaps were process generations, rather than years, although everyone familiar with the roadmapping process knew there was a rough equivalence between the two (at Chipco a new process generation is developed and ramped every two years). On some technology development roadmaps, question marks appeared in the far-right columns (where the specifications for “ramp + 5,” or five process generations in the future, would otherwise be recorded) to reflect the fact that process details and/or equipment remained uncertain in the far future. 4 The inclusion of adaptive or pervasive recognizes that some routines that change over time may do so primarily through slippage or improvisation (flexible use) on the part of actors (adaptive routines) and others may do so because they are designed as adjustable mechanisms, or “metaroutines” (Adler et al. 1999) that are strongly embedded in other structures that support their continuous adaptation.

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