Once 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.
This paper considers how issue sellers advance new issues within an organization over time, and how they gain competence at doing so. Using ethnographic, archival, and interview data spanning a ...six-year period, it describes the moves made by members of a high-tech manufacturer to introduce environmental considerations into the design of new manufacturing processes. A significant shift occurred in the pattern of moves used over time, and explanations for the shift are found in two accompanying dynamics: The gradual accumulation of assets by the group advancing the issues and their adjustment of moves used based on earlier experiences. The findings are used to develop a model of issue selling as resourcing ; that is, a practical accomplishment through which issue sellers moves enact key schemas held by issue recipients, triggering their attention and action on the issue. Issue selling as resourcing builds on recent work on resources and organizational boundaries to address how organizational contexts shape opportunities for and barriers to issue selling, and to identify how issue sellers learn to operate effectively within them.
Companies do not respond identically when faced with similar environmental issues, confounding research that looks only at external influences on corporate environmental practice. In this article, ...the author explores the role of internal factors, specifically an organization's culture and subcultures, in shaping a company's interpretations and actions on environmental issues. Organizational culture influences how an organization 's members define, or "set," problems and the strategies they draw on to solve such problems. Drawing from a 9-month ethnographic study of a high-tech manufacturer, the author finds that the existence of multiple subcultures gives rise to divergent interpretations and strategies for action for environmental issues and that the relative power of the subcultures influences which interpretations and strategies for action are ultimately adopted. Differences between subcultures and the nature of the relationships between them can explain some of the variation in attention and action observed as organizations address issues of environmental protection.
This book fills a critical gap as a textbook and reference book on the comprehensive environmental impacts of industrial organizations. It is intended for both upper-level undergraduate and beginning ...graduate students in environmental studies or engineering, and, more broadly, for practicing managers and engineers seeking to improve industrial processes. Nineteen chapters, each focusing on an industrial sector, from resource extraction through fabrication and manufacturing to recycling, evaluate the sector's inherent "potential to pollute" by providing an overview of typical sector operations and their environmental implications. Beyond outlining and providing frameworks for assessing industrial facilities' contemporary interactions with the environment (energy and water use, material throughput and hazard, and pollution potential), the book provides forward-looking analyses concerning how new technologies and practices can transform environmentally degrading effects of industry. It also addresses how managers can navigate these changes and move their industrial organizations towards environmental sustainability over the long term. The pedagogical approach emphasizes facility visits and subsequent reports that make use of the book's analytical tools.
Topics in the book include the following: -Key topics in greening the industrial facility -Regulatory compliance -Pollution prevention -Life-cycle assessment of products, processes, and facilities -Sustainability assessments -Industrial sector analysis (19 sector-specific chapters from Agriculture to Textiles) -The future of industry and environmental issues.
The nature and scope of changes in organizations’ external environments is without precedent due to planetary shifts, or major changes in earth’s biophysical systems. Our theories of organizational ...adaptation lack the capacity to explain what will be needed on behalf of business organizations, and their strategists and managers, to adjust to these shifts. In this essay, we review organizational adaptation theory and explain why it falls short of offering adequate explanations in an era of planetary shifts. We then draw on ecological theories of adaptation, with their focus on social-ecological systems and panarchy, to suggest ways to advance organizational adaptation theory for our times.
In this paper, we argue that successful integration of knowledge across work domains in the short-term can mask the generation of long-term consequences. We explore a setting, the introduction of ...environmental considerations into semiconductor manufacturing, where the eventual adoption of common measurement artifacts and associated practices enabled knowledge integration, but failed to address significant underlying consequences. Drawing from observational, interview, and archival data we develop an understanding of the work practices of the Tech and EnviroTech groups as structured by the material world and broader collective conventions. We introduce the concept of knowledge regime to outline the differences in knowledge across these work domains. More specifically, we find that differences in the causal specificity and developmental time horizon of knowledge and the measurement artifacts that result contribute to the relative power of one knowledge regime over another. Understanding these sources of incompatibility provides insight into the design requirements of information systems as boundary objects for knowledge integration, but also specifies the potential limits to any design effort.
The unique nature of social initiatives, such as projects for environmental protection, diversity, or community development, poses particular challenges for those who wish to get them on the ...organizational agenda. How do their proponents both legitimize and gain action on these initiatives--activities that involve tapping into existing organizational beliefs, or cultural frames--when an organization has historically considered such issues to be outside its realm of concern? We identify eight possible cultural frames that may be used to motivate corporate action on social initiatives, and we illustrate the use of one frame through a case study of a high-technology manufacturer addressing a particular environmental problem. We use the case to identify framing tactics which proponents of social initiatives can use to best advance such issues in their organizations. These include using the metrics and language of relevant functional groups to assign responsibility for the problems, engaging the standard routines or approaches used in such groups, and using the culturally appropriate public and/or private channels to communicate the issue, eventually gaining allies in these groups. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of cultural framing for organizational change and for the broader debate on the connection between financial and social performance.
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