In this paper, as an introduction to the technical note series “How Organizational Routines Are Created, Maintained, and Changed―Howard-Grenville et al. (2016),” we outline the worldview of the process school of organizational routine theory. In particular, we contrast the worldviews of March and Simon (1958) and Nelson and Winter (1982) to show that the process school views organizational routines as phenomena that emerge as a result of the interactions of organizational members, rather than existing independently of their actions.

This article focuses on Chapter 1 “Advancing a Process Perspective on Routines by Zooming Out and Zooming” of Howard-Grenville et al. (2016a). Their Chapter 1 introduces the contents of subsequent chapters from a process school perspective while using analytical frameworks such as routine “entanglement” and “zooming”. This article first provides an overview of Chapter 1 and then discusses what issues are seen in the way the authors of Chapter 1 presented their analytical frameworks and how routine research has developed subsequently.