The Becoming of Reputation-making Routines: Bridging the Practice Lens with Process Studies

In the ever-evolving organizational environment where the only constant is change, there is an increasing need to revisit the interrelationships between organizational routines and change. From a practice lens perspective, routines are treated as generative systems created through the interplays between actions people undertake and the patterns and structures these actions in turn recreate. Although the seminal work on routines as practices has acknowledged their dynamism, there is yet a long way to go until we fully understand and exemplify the relationships between organizational routines and change, as well as how and why technological evolution has transformed organizational routines into generative systems. How are routines to be perceived if as Chia (2002) more strongly puts it, all we have is change? Inspired by how process theorists have analyzed change, the paper draws on this work to discuss how reputation-making routines have changed in the travel sector. The primary research question focuses on how reputation-making routines become over time and what the role of algorithmic classification systems in this process is. By closely studying reputation-making routines we propose a reconceptualization of change, as constant transformation rather than aberration of sameness or stability and we gain a more insightful understanding of the interplays between the ways routines are enacted on a micro level.