The Role of Multiple Ostensive Aspects in Practicing Change and Stabilizing Routines

Drawing on recent debates on performative-ostensive cycles in routine theory, this paper proposes a framework which can better characterize the mutual adaptation between existing multiple understandings and actual performances in practicing change and stabilization of organizational routines. This framework, combined with an exploratory case study of an exogenous change (a merger between a university and an art college), enables a better understanding of the structural variations in routine dynamics by depicting the recursive relationship between multiple ostensive aspects created by different pressures for consistency, on the one hand, and change and stabilization in performances in the merged entity, on the other. The framework explicates how the existence of multiple ostensive aspects, distributed throughout the organization from the bottom to the top and beyond its vanishing boundaries, simultaneously enables and constrains changes in performance as routine participants enact the routine in practice.