Organizational Routines

Abstract Routines are ubiquitous in every organization, capturing the typical way in which participants repetitively accomplish their organizational tasks. Conducting agent-based modelling (ABM) in organizational routines is an interdisciplinary but burgeoning area of research, and publications are still rare. This chapter offers an overview of the cotemporary use of ABM in organizational routines research. It then summarizes the development of organizational routines, particularly routine dynamics, which has rapidly grown in recent years. The chapter then discusses the goal and intended purposes of ABM (i.e., including illustration, description, theoretical exposition, explanation, and prediction) and compares several typical agent-based models that have been developed in the literature. By doing this, several challenges and potential reflections of future work are identified. The chapter shows a general picture of how ABM as a methodology can be applied for theory building in the field of organizational routines, hence theoretically contributing to literature on both organizational routines and ABM.