Introduction: Routine Dynamics in Action

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.