Enacting Sustainability Through Organizational Routines: A Grounded Theory of Capability–Institution Co-Structuring

In institutional environments characterized by ambiguity and contestation, the formation of sustainability capabilities poses significant interpretive and organizational challenges. Existing perspectives often assume clear mandates, strategic intent, and rational agency, yet such assumptions rarely hold in transitional or weakly institutionalized settings. This study adopts a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) approach to examine how sustainability-related routines emerge, stabilize, and contribute to capability formation under conditions of institutional complexity. Drawing from multiple organizational cases across East Asian contexts, this study identifies three interdependent categories of routines, including sensemaking, stabilization, and coordination, that interact recursively to generate sustainability capabilities. These routines function not as linear processes or technical tools, but as dynamic infrastructures of interpretation, consolidation, and alignment. Their recursive interplay enables organizations to translate ambiguous sustainability signals into patterned practices and symbolic legitimacy over time. We consolidate these insights into a mid-range theoretical framework, the Routines-as-Practice Configuration for Sustainability Structuring (RAPCSS). The RAPCSS explains how sustainability is not merely implemented but enacted and continually remade through situated, performative routines. By bridging strategic and practice-based perspectives, this study contributes to sustainability theory by theorizing capabilities as emergent configurations shaped through recursive routine work. This offers a situated, processual, and reflexive account of how sustainability unfolds under conditions of institutional ambiguity.