Routine Interdependencies Within and Across Organizations: Transforming Toward Distant Future Goals

Organizations are increasingly making pledges to collectively share distant future goals regarding complex social and environmental challenges. From a routine dynamics perspective, organizations, as dynamic sets of interdependent routines, would need to significantly transform their established organizational routines and their interdependencies. To explore the transformational dynamics of interdependent routine sets toward a collectively shared direction, we draw on an ethnographic study of the Regenerative Farming Pilot Network within cooperative dairy company Arla, owned by more than 8,400 dairy farmers in Europe. Gathering 24 of its farmer-owners as pilot farmers, the Pilot Network intended to explore how regenerative farming practices could help to shape their transformative trajectories toward creating the future of dairy. Our study identified that although two routine sets – producing milk in the barn daily and producing feed in the field seasonally – were comparable across farms, they were unique spatial-temporal configurations of those sets due to their social-ecological-technical embeddedness. As new regenerative practices were identified and introduced, actors on farms, both human and non-human, integrated them into the established routine sets by regenerating routine interdependencies between routines, between routine sets, and across organizations. Despite the reconfiguration of routine sets forming different trajectories for different pilot farms, reconfiguring routine sets across farms made these different trajectories direct at a collective goal. The findings contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by advancing a more-than-human perspective, conceptualizing routines as spatial-temporal configurations, and strengthening a flat ontological view. Our study provides practical insights on regenerating routine interdependencies within and across organizations for developing one-size-does-not-fit-all solutions.