What is the influence of software systems on an organization's ability to create knowledge, learn, adapt to change and innovate? While organization, management and innovation theory has primarily focused on the impact of software on measures such as process efficiency and speed, this book argues that integrated systems and digital technologies offer even more fundamental implications for the innovating firm. A series of detailed case studies provides the foundations for a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of the nature and dynamics of software, knowledge, organization and their complex interactions. The author demonstrates how software induces the radical reconfiguration of organizational knowledge and learning dynamics, including an organization's ability to create, store, transfer and integrate knowledge across heterogeneous organizational boundaries. The book provides a unique perspective on what organizations know and how they use that knowledge to build, sustain and renew their capabilities. This includes understanding how information systems can be designed or implemented in such a way as to favour innovation and adaptation, and to prevent unfavourable patterns of behaviour. The book represents an in-depth and systematic attempt to characterize the fundamental influence of software over the processes that underpin an organization's ability to create and manage knowledge. Scholars and students interested in innovation, technological change and information technology, and managers in software and other hi-tech industries will find this an insightful and highly rewarding study.

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.