Organizational routines as embodied performatives: A communication as constitutive of organization perspective

Inquiring into how routines unfold increases our understanding of organization. This article critiques current positionings of organizational routines as practices and offers an alternative framing based on routines as communicatively constituted performatives. Two central arguments are advanced. First, present constructions of routines as comprising structurationist interpretations of Latour's ostensive and performative are challenged and an alternative is advanced that draws from an Austinian understanding of performative as constitutive of organization. Second, bodies are brought into routines research as they are conceptualized as embodied accomplishments, extending existing research that typically neglects the body. An alternative definition of organizational routines is offered that constructs them as citational patterns of embodied conversation and textual dialectics that performatively co-orient toward an object.