Experimental approaches are gaining in popularity across disciplines, ranging from behavioural sciences to economics. In this chapter, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of field experiments and review their use by scholars to study routine dynamics. Based on these, we suggest that field experiments hold further promise to study routines given their potential to develop and test theory, while achieving internal and external validity. To further the adoption of field experiments to study routines, we outline a five-step procedure, including research questions and hypotheses, context and research setting, treatment and design, measurement and statistical tests, and managing field experiments. We conclude by discussing potential research questions and contexts suitable for field experiments.

Open-source platforms are an increasingly popular business model for AI development for global technology companies. This chapter examines why a restrictive (non-fuzzy) interpretation of the data localisation provisions within the Cyber Security Law would harm the growth of China’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, focusing on recent Chinese government plans to grow its own domestic open-source AI ecosystem. Accordingly, this chapter reinforces the reasons why fuzzy logic lawmaking in China is so effective. It also queries whether the increased popularity of open-source platforms in China during 2017–2019 may have been another reason why data localisation was not comprehensively enforced.

This chapter considers how the Routine Dynamics debate around technology, artifacts and materiality has evolved over the course of the past two decades. In reviewing the progress achieved so far, I show how the field is gearing up to address the important challenges posed, among other things, by new forms of artifacts and technology, and new ways of organizing. In so doing, I discuss how the latest advances in routines and materiality (artifacts at the centre, performativity and multiplicity/fluid ontology) can help us address the theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges raised by contemporary material phenomena. I conclude by laying out an agenda for future studies of routines, technology, artifacts and materiality.

Organizational ethnography has been crucial for the development of the field of Routine Dynamics since the beginning. It has altered the grain size of analysis and shifted the focus from the firm and its routines to the routine and the people, actions and artefacts that bring it to life. The discovery-oriented nature of ethnographic research has and continues to challenge the conceived wisdom of routines and their role in organizations. The majority of work in Routine Dynamics relies on ethnographic approaches and sensibilities. In this chapter, I review 43 studies and the various ways in which they draw on ethnography. Despite the wide variety of settings these studies have explored and the evidentiary approaches they draw on, I argue that Routine Dynamics research can draw on more novel and innovative forms of ethnographic research. This will allow scholars to address hitherto neglected aspects of routines, such as their emotional and aesthetic qualities, new contemporary phenomena that are of societal concern, such as inequality, climate change and epidemics, and make Routine Dynamics research more practically relevant.

This chapter deals with the role practice theory has played and can play in developing routine dynamics and the community of scholars associated with Routine Dynamics. It provides a short introduction to practice theory. It presents an analysis of how scholars in the field of Routine Dynamics relied on practice theory to build the foundation of the field and how scholars have continued to engage practice theory as the field has grown. The chapter ends with suggestions for how practice theory could help Routine Dynamics address questions of wide social relevance.

Routine dynamics and Business Process Management (BPM) are two academic disciplines that investigate sequences of action for carrying out work in organizations. Even though they share this phenomenon of interest, there are fundamental differences that separate both research areas. In this chapter, we take a first step to overcome this divide. To do this, we portray BPM by use of the business process lifecycle. The lifecycle well adopted instrument that allows us to describe how activities in BPM are interlinked and discuss the state of the art. Based on these insights, we develop multiple directions how routine dynamics and BPM can learn from and contribute to one another. We believe that a closer integration of both research areas can help to advance how we study and theorize about processes in organizations.

How to organize work is a topic at the core of routine dynamics, and studying novel forms of organizing constitutes a prime occasion for theory development. Though self-managed forms of organizing (SMOs) have held perennial interest by scholars and practitioners alike, contemporary SMOs are larger, and more rule driven than their earlier counterparts. Our chapter offers a primer on contemporary SMOs and identifies key issues that a routine dynamics perspective can lend towards seeing, tracing and understanding contemporary SMOs.

Implicitly or explicitly, sequence analysis is at the heart of research on routine dynamics. Sequence analysis takes many forms in many different disciplines, because sequence is central to temporality, process, language, and narrative. In this chapter, we focus on sequence analysis in routine dynamics research. The goal of this chapter is to help researchers use sequence analysis in their research on routine dynamics. Hence, the chapter reviews prior literature that has used sequence analysis, it shows how to carry out sequence analysis and it provides implications as well as an agenda for future research.

Organizational actors spend a tremendous amount of time and energy trying to intentionally change their routines. We conceptualize these intentional changes as routine design—intentional efforts to change one or more aspects of a routine to create a preferred situation. We review existing routines research on intentional change by showing how different perspectives on routines have generated different insights about the relationship between intentional change and design. We highlight a cognitive perspective, a practice perspective, and an ontological process perspective on routine design. We then draw on two perspectives inspired by design studies. Simon’s scientific perspective on design suggests that routines scholars study the effects and implications of designing artifacts. Schön’s reflective practice perspective on design suggests that routines scholars can examine how actors set the problem, engage in (re)framing, and in reflection-in-action. These design studies perspectives offer routines scholars a better understanding of efforts to intentionally change routines. Based on these insights from design studies, we develop a future research agenda for routine design.

This chapter analyses the policy and regulatory developments leading up to the enactment of the Cyber Security Law, including China’s Anti-Terrorism Law and how enforced source code ‘backdoor provisions’ were removed from the final draft of this law to protect China’s innovation policy goals. The discussion of China’s Network Sovereignty push is continued by explaining the significant debate about Network Sovereignty-related ideological thinking in China’s Anti-Terrorism Law. This law is yet another example of how problematic laws are delayed, as further consultation is sought. Comparisons are also made with a similar policy debate on ‘backdoor provisions’ in the United States, to show that the initial Chinese approach was not so different from universal debates, at that time, and ultimately reflects international practice. Similar approaches are now finding more widespread acceptance globally including in Australia and the United Kingdom.

The ideas of classical pragmatists receive increasing attention by scholars working in diverse fields, who realize their fertility in addressing contemporary theoretical and practical challenges. Pragmatism, as a philosophical perspective, embraces a processual view of the world according to which what really exists is ‘in the making,’ in a process of becoming, and places great attention to action and its meaningful experience. In this chapter, I introduce the common themes in the work of the founding figures of classical pragmatism and examine their convergence with the theoretical assumptions underpinning routine dynamics theorizing. I trace the influence of pragmatism in routine dynamics research and suggest that pragmatist thinking has much to offer to the study of routines as dynamic, processual phenomena.