UNDERSTANDING THE (RE)CREATION OF ROUTINES FROM WITHIN: A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST PERSPECTIVE DIONYSIOS D. DIONYSIOU ALBA Graduate Business School at The American College of Greece HARIDIMOS TSOUKAS University of Cyprus and University of Warwick Drawing on symbolic interactionism, we propose a process model for the creation and recreation of routines. Our model extends the performative perspective by exploring how routines, as collective accomplishments, are (re)created from within. In particu- lar, we examine the mutual constitution of routines’ constituent parts (performative and ostensive) through interaction, and we develop endogenous explanations of routine (re)creation grounded on the actions and understandings of mutually suscep- tible participants. Mead’s concept of role taking, with its strong emphasis on the relational aspect of agency, enables us to account for the fitting together of individual lines of action (performative) and the sharing of participants’ schemata (included in the ostensive) as mutually constituted processes that occur as participants develop distinct selves in the context of a routine. Moreover, we account for the content and structure of the ostensive aspect and propose a conceptualization that does justice to it as a singular structural construct and allows for its multiplicity. Organizational routines (hereafter simply “routines”) are an important element of organi- zational behavior. Defined as repetitive, recog- nizable patterns of interdependent actions that involve multiple actors (Feldman & Pentland, 2003: 96; Howard-Grenville, 2005: 618; Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011: 417), routines have long been regarded as the primary means through which organizations accomplish much of what they do (Becker, 2004, 2008; Cyert & March, 1963; Levitt & March, 1988; March & Si- mon, 1958; Nelson & Winter, 1982). Early work on routines can be traced back to the notions of “performance programs” (March & Simon, 1958), “standard operating procedures” (Cyert & March, 1963), and Nelson and Winter’s (1982) metaphor of routines as “genes.” This early work, which approached routines as “trun- cated, collective, recurrent entities or ‘black boxes’” (Salvato & Rerup, 2010: 2; see also Par- migiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011), accounted, at least partly, for stability in organizations (Pentland & Feldman, 2005) and focused on the effects of routines on higher-level phenomena (e.g., organizational performance, learning, and capabilities; Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011; Pentland & Feldman, 2005; Rerup & Feld- man, 2011; Salvato & Rerup, 2010). Although the black box approach has historically been the most common (Pentland & Feldman, 2005: 800), it has been criticized for ignoring the internal structure and dynamics of routines (Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011; Pentland & Feldman, 2005; Rerup & Feldman, 2011; Salvato & Rerup, 2010). By treating routines as faits accomplis, scholars using the black box approach adopted a relatively static image of routines, largely ne- glecting the microprocesses through which rou- tines are accomplished (Becker, 2008; Feldman, 2000; Felin & Foss, 2009: 161; Pentland & Reu- ter, 1994). In the past decade scholars have proposed a performative view of routines (for a review see Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011), with the goal of addressing the aforementioned short- comings. The performative view opens up the black box of routines to look into the processes inside. By focusing explicitly on agency, the per- We are indebted to associate editor Rick Delbridge and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and thoughtful guidance on our manuscript. We also thank Martha S. Feldman and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe for their help- ful comments on earlier drafts of the article.  Academy of Management Review 2013, Vol. 38, No. 2, 181–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.0215 181 Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.