Contains an Open Access chapter. As organizations become increasingly distributed and diverse, and products, technologies and services more complex and dispersed, there is mounting pressure to understand how work can be coordinated across geographical, cultural and intellectual distance, both within and across organizations. As a result, questions arise about how work is accomplished through organizational practices and routines and in particular how patterns of actions are replicated and transformed across different contexts and over time. Routine dynamics has started to explore these dynamics by focusing attention on how routines (as practices) are enacted and, thus, created and re-created over time and across organizational locations through the actions of people and machines. This book explores central themes in the enactment and coordination of organizational routines, drawing in particular on in-depth case studies and empirically-grounded theorizing. The chapters explore important organizational phenomena in the areas of strategy, entrepreneurship, human resources, health care, social policy, and the arts. Focusing in particular on four central themes in routine dynamics: replication and transfer; ecology and interdependence; action and the generation of novelty and technology and sociomateriality.

Over the last two decades, Routine Dynamics has emerged as an international research community that shares a particular approach to organizational phenomena. At the heart of this approach is an interest in examining the emergence, reproduction, replication and change of routines as recognizable patterns of actions. In contrast to other research communities interested in those phenomena, Routine Dynamics studies are informed by a distinctive set of theories (especially practice theory and related process-informed theories). This Handbook offers both an accessible introduction to core concepts and approaches in Routine Dynamics as well as a comprehensive and authoritative overview of research in different areas of Routine Dynamics. The chapters of this Handbook are structured around four core themes: 1) Theoretical resources for research on the dynamics of routines, 2) Methodological issues in studying the dynamics routines, 3) Themes in Routine Dynamics research and 4) Relation of Routine Dynamics to other communities of thought.