We are proud to share that our paper: “The Time is Right When you Make it Right: Coordinating Routine Clusters in Sustained Crisis” has been published in the prestigious journal “Organization Studies”.

The article examines how organizations coordinate routines to achieve reliable collective action in sustained, temporally complex crises. We conducted an observational study of the Uganda Red Cross Society’s Ebola emergency response operation, which lasted for almost two years. Our findings reveal that sustained crises necessitate both the enacting of clusters of interrelated routines to achieve reliable operations and the accommodating of unexpected events when coordinating these clusters. Thereby, this study contributes to research on coordinating routines in sustained crises in two ways. First, we challenge traditional views of routine clusters as stable and path dependent, arguing that tolerating temporal conflicts between routines enables the flexible coordination of routine clusters during sustained crises. Second, we introduce the concept of temporal manipulation, which challenges existing thinking about the need for temporal alignment of routine performances. Temporal manipulation is the ability of routine participants to exercise agency by altering the past and/or future to successfully coordinate routines with diverging temporalities. This suggests that manipulating time, rather than aligning it, can be an effective means of coordination in sustained crises.

The full paper can be downloaded here

We are proud to announce that Daniel Geiger, Tania Räcker and David Seidl have just published their paper "From coordinating in space to coordinating through space: A spatial perspective on coordinating" in Organization Theory. 

You can find the full paper here.

We are proud to announce that Daniel Geiger and Waldemar Kremser have just published their paper "Granularity Matters! Towards a Methodological Framework for Understanding Routine Dynamics" in Research in the Sociology of Organizations. 

You can find the full paper here. 

Organizing in times of crisis: Reflections on organizing the EGOS Annual colloquium 2020 and its impact on academia. In this provocative essay we share some insights and anecdotes from our experience of organizing EGOS 2020 as an online conference and discuss the broader implications on academia of this move.

You can find the full paper here.

Dr. Ali Aslan Gümüsay has co-authored an article together with Professor Michael Smets on organizational hybrids and their liability of novelty published in Research in the Sociology of Organizations. In it, they explain that ventures may face not only a liability of newness but also a liability of novelty. The legitimacy threshold for ventures that are institutionally novel is higher than for those that are merely organizationally new. This is because they face both additional descriptive and evaluative liabilities. A new organizational form can be both “not understood” & “not accepted”. Dr. Ali Aslan Gümüsay has co-authored an article together with Professor Michael Smets on organizational hybrids and their liability of novelty published in Research in the Sociology of Organizations. In it, they explain that ventures may face not only a liability of newness but also a liability of novelty. The legitimacy threshold for ventures that are institutionally novel is higher than for those that are merely organizationally new. This is because they face both additional descriptive and evaluative liabilities. A new organizational form can be both “not understood” & “not accepted”.

The article can be found on the emerald insight website. 

Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Laura Claus and John Amis have published an article entitled "Engaging with Grand Challenges: An Institutional Logics Perspective” in Organization Theory. The editor of the journal, Joep Cornelissen, noted in his acceptance letter: "Thank you once more for your fine contribution. Your paper not only deepens our understanding of the institutional logics perspective but also nicely demonstrates how it can be used for the most pressing challenges of our times. I am hopeful that it will be picked up for both of these reasons and will have a significant impact.”

The full article can be found here. A video summary can be found here.

We are proud to announce that Daniel Geiger, Anja Danner-Schröder and Waldemar Kremser have just published their paper on the temporal coordination of multiple routines in emergencies in the prestigious ASQ Journal.

The paper is the result of an ethnographic study conducted with the Hamburg firefighters in 2013/14 which enabled us to closely observe the firefighters in action. The study shows how firefighters coordinate routines in highly-dynamic and dangerous situations by a) de-coupling the performance of routines from disturbing influences from the outside to avoid chaos and stay focused and b) by timely responding to the emerging situation by performing temporal boundaries between routines. It builds on a newly developed method to analyze and code ethnographic data and shows how firefighters are able to bend time in the performance of routines.

ASQ is the world-leading journal in the field of management science and publications undergo a rigorous and highly selected review process.

You can find the full paper here. 

In this paper Daniel Geiger, Lisa Harborth and Alex Mugyisha translate insights from our study of routine coordination in the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) response operation by Uganda Red Cross Society (URCS) for managing long-lasting public health emergencies. We further show how these lessons are relevant for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Commonly, emergency response organizations, like URCS or hospitals, are ill equipped to handle longer lasting emergencies. These emergencies require special measures that combine ad-hoc action, continuous awareness over longer time periods, and the collaboration of multiple actors, like government, public health institutions, and other non-governmental organizations.

Please click on the following link for the paper.

This conceptual paper advances theorizing on routine interdependencies. It presents a review and comparison of the two dominant schools of thought in this stream of research: routine ecologies and routine clusters. While the former emphasizes generativity and flexibility, the latter conceptualizes interdependencies as limiting to organizational dynamics and change. Despite these diverging assumptions, the paper suggests combining – rather than separating – insights from both schools of thought. It contributes to routine interdependence research in three ways. First, the paper provides an integrative framework that emphasizes the complementary dynamics between both schools of thought. Second, the paper suggests that coordinating interdependent routines is an ongoing process of addressing different degrees of interdependence with specific modes of coordination. Third, the paper reveals that interdependent routines and the underlying coordination processes play a central role in balancing organizational stability and change.

Hoekzema, J. (2020). Bridging the Gap between Ecologies and Clusters: Towards an Integrative Framework of Routine Interdependence, in: European Management Review, 17(2), 559–571.

Full article can be found here.