Do China’s data localisation laws, which were introduced as part of China’s Network Sovereignty policy, adversely affect – or are they likely to adversely affect – open innovation in Chinese AI firms, which is a key goal of China’s Internet Plus policy?

China’s approach to innovation is unique. To analyse the main features of economic innovation and entrepreneurship in contemporary China, it is first necessary to dispel some common misconceptions. In addressing that topic, this chapter focuses on explaining: (1) technological innovation and how it has been conventionally understood in the literature; (2) China’s distinctive approach to technological innovation; (3) in particular, the complex role of the government, and regulation, in innovation in China; and (4) how China’s distinctive approach to innovation may actually be better at promoting innovation in AI technologies, and other rapidly developing technologies, than other approaches.

This chapter considers how facets of occupations and professions manifest in routine dynamics. Whilst the salience of occupations and professions on routines has been recognized in extant research on routine dynamics, it remains largely scattered. To illuminate the salience of occupations and professions in the literature on routine dynamics, which is multifaceted, we focus on three prominent research themes: skilful accomplishment (i.e., how actors perform tasks), interdependence (i.e., how actors collaborate to accomplish tasks) and truces (i.e., how actors compete to make exclusive claims to perform certain activities). We turn to the literature on professions and occupations to draw out theoretical and empirical intersections with research advocating routine dynamics. The analytical framework, comprised of a becoming lens, a doing lens and a relating lens corresponds with and provides the basis to advance research themes within routine dynamics. We suggest a stronger emphasis on occupations and professions holds promise for deepening knowledge about routine dynamics, which we articulate by proposing several avenues for future research, including the expansion of the concept of routines and a distinction between organizational and professional routines.

Organizations increasingly rely upon algorithms to change their routines—with positive, negative, or messy outcomes. In this chapter, we argue that conceptualizing algorithms as an integral part of an assemblage provides scholars with the ability to generate novel theories about how algorithms influence routine dynamics. First, we review existing research that shows how algorithms operate as an actant making decisions; encode the intentions of designers; are entangled in broader assemblages of theories, artifacts, actors, and practices; and generate performative effects. Second, we elucidate five analytical approaches that can help management scholars to identify new connections between routine assemblages, their elements, and organizational outcomes. Finally, we outline directions for future research to explore how studying algorithms can advance our understanding of routine dynamics and how a routine dynamics perspective can contribute to the understanding of algorithms in strategy and organizational theory more broadly .

Over time, organizational routines are likely to become persistent or even path-dependent. Such a process is obviously influenced by the degree of routinization; by the complexity, inter¬dependency and complementarity of routines; and also by their embeddedness in (inter-)organizational structures and practices. However, the acknowledgement of the tendency of routines to become path-dependent also depends on the theoretical lens used to examine them. Under the conditions mentioned, the classic view attributes a high likelihood of routines to become path-dependent – and thereby become a source of inertia or persistence, if not of the path dependence of a subunit or entire organization. The more recent view of routine dynamics, by contrast, requires a more nuanced reasoning. Against the background of this debate, the chapter discusses what routine dynamics research can learn from studies of organizational path dependence – and vice versa.

Actor-network theory has always been an inspiring theoretical and methodological source for Routine Dynamics research. Seeing routines as networks of actants and as a consequence rather than a cause of collective action enabled scholars to move away from a priori assumptions about the world and shift their attention to situated performances, multiplicity, and connections-in action. In this chapter, I provide a brief historical account of actor-network theory highlighting some of its central authors and their work before unravelling how Routine Dynamics scholars have appropriated it—ironically, often as an undercover actor that remains invisible at first sight—and conclude by reflecting on how actor-network theory can continue to be of use for and shape Routine Dynamics research.

The key provisions of China’s Cyber Security Law relating to data localisation and data exits still allow for competing interpretations by regulators, which makes compliance difficult, even in 2021. The further attempt to include ‘backdoor’ keys to encryption in this law is also noted, although foreign companies have managed to exert some influence on this point and other implementation issues. The Cyber Security Law is an important and high-profile development in Chinese cyber policy history. It created much more controversy than the Anti-Terrorism Law explained in the previous chapter. In recent years, China has gradually adopted a series of laws, regulations and macro policies in the field of cyber security and data protection aimed at turning the country into a ‘cyber superpower’ and boosting its digital economy. The Cyber Security Law, which came into partial effect from 1 June 2017 (with an official 18-month phase-in period for the data localisation provisions), is a milestone in the development of China’s legal framework for cyber security and data protection. The law also provides further evidence of the inherent tensions underlying the innovation policies described in Chapter 3. However, vague regulations allow regulators leeway to adjust their aims in response to broader economic and political trends by means of implementing rules. Finally, clarifying the vaguest provisions in the Cyber Security Law through more transparent rules may provide an opportunity for the Chinese government to decide which way it is heading: towards further innovation or further restriction beyond the ongoing US–China trade war.

Narrative networks provide a way to summarize the "pattern-in-variety" that is typical of organizational routines. Unlike social networks, the nodes in a narrative network represent actions or events. By formalizing action patterns as networks, narrative networks provide a foundation for visualizing and analysing stability and change in routines.

In this chapter, we review the literature on interdependent routines. We group previous studies on routine interdependence around key concepts – boundaries & intersections, clusters, ecologies, and bundles – and highlight the different analytical foci and results of each group. Hence, we make an argument for leveraging the analytical differences of such concepts as cluster and ecologies, rather than treating them as synonyms. In closing, we point out several avenues for future research.

China’s fuzzy logic system and government support for pilot petri dishes is perfectly suited to the current state of AI research. This has enabled the rapid development of world-class AI applications, particularly in image recognition. This is due, in part, to the regulatory environment facilitating the development of AI pilots. Yet it is further argued that this suitability is due to a combination of three factors: (1) the current state of AI research and its applicability to numerous real-world applications; (2) the open nature of AI research culture globally; and (3) the complex emerging role of public–private petri dishes in China for testing innovative applications. The chapter also explains how public–private connections are formed, including how top-down government signalling is important to the trajectory of private companies.

In this chapter, I revisit key tenets of Routine Dynamics (RD) research to take stock of its progress and note areas for further development, and then show how strong process-cum-practice perspective, which I have called performative phenomenology, may be drawn upon to advance RD research. I argue that RD research will need to: explore how tacit knowledge affects routine enactment; better understand exogenously originated deliberate change in routines; and take explicitly on board the moral dimension of routine enactment.

Projects are forms of organizing that have become increasingly common in the past decades. The ad-hoc and temporary nature of projects seemingly poses significant challenges to the patterning of activities into organizational routines. Yet, considerable research in routine dynamics has been carried out in project contexts. In this chapter, we show that projects and routines share some common characteristics and that acknowledging the project nature of routines as well as the organizational routine nature of projects offers significant opportunities for the advancement of routine dynamics research.

In this chapter we focus on organizational routines for innovation work. We counter the view that routines and innovation are an unlikely couple. Emphasizing that innovation work is characterized by emergence, dispersed collaboration between heterogeneous actors, and novelty, we are beginning to see how mundane actions—as opposed to grand creative acts—and the interplay between routines and standard operating procedures are driving the development of innovations-in-the-making. We review empirical routine dynamic studies of innovation work to point out affordances of the routine dynamic lens and suggest new avenues for studying innovation work to contribute new theoretical insights about organizational routines.

I review the routine dynamics literature from a professional identity perspective. Little research has been carried out in this area, although important insights can be acquired from understanding the dynamics of routine enactment through routine participants’ professional identities. I discuss how routines and routine participants’ professional identities are mutually constitutive, meaning that change in one can lead to change in the other, and vice versa. I propose future research that can help us to better understand stability and change in routines, and what effect stability and change in routines can have on routine participants’ professional identities.

In this chapter, we show how different conceptualizations of routine complexity can produce different insights into the study of the dynamics of routines. Based on a selective review of the literature, we identify three different approaches to routine complexity that has been applied in empirical research: that is, complexity as (a) a perceptual characteristic of routines, (b) a function of idealized characteristics of routines, and (c) a function of enactments. Our review shows that early studies of routines have predominantly treated complexity as a perceptual phenomenon, whereas in only a few studies have complexity been conceived of as a more objective characteristic of routines. More recently, a stream of research has begun to capture the complexity of routines as an enacted phenomenon, in line with the practice-turn in routine research. We scrutinize the underlying assumptions in each of these approaches and outline the potential directions for future investigations on the complexity of routines.

Temporality and spatiality are important features for understanding Routine Dynamics from a process perspective. In this chapter I present Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope as a method for understanding how different configurations of time and space influence the (re)creation of routines. I show the overlap between Dialogism and Routine Dynamics through Bakhtin’s concept of the utterance in dialogue as being both the patterning and performing of action. I then explain the concept of the chronotope before using an empirical example to illustrate it as a tool for analysing time and space configurations, showing how they influence action patterns. I juxtapose this analysis against recent studies in Routine Dynamics that have used the role of talk to understand routine change and show what we might see differently through the lens of the chronotope.