Introduction

Organizational routines evolved into a central concept in organizational research and represent a fundamental idea of how organizations accomplish their work (Felin and Foss, 2009; Salvato and Rerup, 2010; Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011; Felin et al., 2012). In the past decades, research on organizational routines yielded major results (e.g., Nelson and Winter, 1982; Feldman and Pentland, 2003) and strengthened the understanding of the concept. Scholars proved routines to be essential for organizations and to be an integral part of organizations (Becker, 2008; Hodgson, 2008). Although scholars are aware of the importance of this concept, to date literature lacks a commonly accepted definition of routines and suffers from numerous ambiguities as well as inconsistencies (Cohen et al., 1996; Jones and Craven, 2001; Reynaud, 2005).