Walking the tightrope: the balancing work of agency in organizational routines

Abstract

The thesis explores how the relationship between agency and structure works in organizational routines. The first paper conceptually analyses agency as decision making. In organizational routines, agents have the freedom to choose which action to perform despite the boundaries of action that the routine imposes. Deciding how to enact the routine alters its unfolding in the short and long term. However, how decision making occurs within organizational routines is still blurry. The paper fills this gap through a model that shows that the internal environment of the organizational routine is characterized by a certain level of uncertainty, information asymmetry, and information overload. As a result, the agent processes a heuristic logic of decision making. The second and the third papers are based on ethnographic research conducted in a museum characterized by a monthly turnover of employees. Data collection and analysis are guided by abductive logic. The second paper explores the input and the output of organizational routines: experience. Experience is the constant interaction of experience-as-stock -the familiarity that agents gain performing the routine- and experience-as-flow -the ongoing transaction between the individual and the environment. Despite the relevance of experience-as-stock for organizational routines and the dependence of it from experience-as-flow, little is known about how the one interacts with the other and vice versa. The paper questions how experience as duality works in organizational routines. The findings suggest that the interaction of experience-as-stock and experience-as-flow provokes the development of the tolerance interval, which is the range of how much the routine can be stretched without collapsing. The tolerance interval is supported by emerging mechanisms of control. These findings are the starting point of the third paper. Given the recurrence of routines and the fact that they are ubiquitous in the organization, not all of them are monitored by top-down mechanisms of control. Control can be emergent and among peers too. The paper investigates how control emerges in organizational routines. Data shows that agents in charge of performing the routine are triggered to shape their role, that overcomes that one assigned by the routine. During the routine performance, agents do not act only as performers, but also as controllers, activating peer monitoring. The seed of peer monitoring comes from the embeddedness of organizational routines in other organizational activities.