The Materiality of Artifacts in Performing Organizational Routines: How Patterns of Action Are Created and Maintained

Although organizational routinesOrganizational routine have often been misunderstood as recurrent interaction patternsRecurrent interactive pattern, recent studies have shown that the actual meaning is closer to abstract patterns of an actionPattern of action generalized from an interaction. This implies that practices involved in performing a routine are not always reproduced, or if they are reproduced, they are not mindless but effortful accomplishments, which has not been fully discussed in management studies applying Giddens’s structuration theory. Therefore, the studies of organizational routinesOrganizational routine have attempted to describe the variety in practices of performing routines and specific abstract patterns of actionPattern of action from the variety. However, the following issue remains unresolved: “Why can we recognize certain patterns in various practices?” or “Why are various practices routinized?” In light of this, we review the history of the discourse on the concept of organizational routinesOrganizational routine, look at the significance of focusing on the materiality that forms organizational routinesOrganizational routine, and introduce empirical studies in Japan that revealed the materiality of artifactsArtifact in terms of affordancesAffordance and framingFraming.