Marlot Kuiper

25 The challenge of working with checklists It is therefore important to rethink the implementation rhetoric and professional as victim or strategic agent antithesis, and search for new ways to conceptualize processes of standardization in healthcare. In this dissertation, I provide such a conceptualization by looking at professional routines. Routines Over several decades, a considerable body of research has been built up around the idea that routines are a crucial part of how organisations accomplish their tasks (Cohen et al., 1996; Cyert & March, 1963; March & Simon, 1958; Nelson & Winter, 1982). Routines were mostly associated with stability and inertia (Cyert & March, 1963; March & Simon, 1958; Nelson & Winter, Sidney, 1982), but a more recent and well-established perspective in the literature is based on the idea that routines are practices with internal dynamics that contribute to both stability and change in organisations (Feldman, 2000; Feldman & Pentland, 2003; Feldman, Pentland, D’Adderio, & Lazaric, 2016). From this perspective, routines are defined as “recognizable, repetitive patterns of interdependent action carried out by multiple actors” that structure work in organisations (Feldman et al., 2016, p. 505). This ‘routine dynamics’ perspective is broadly grounded in the ideas of for example practice theory, situated action, Actor-Network Theory and sociomateriality (Parmigiani & Howard-Grenville, 2011). A practice lens is adopted by some organisational theorists to study “the everyday activity of organising” (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011, p.1). Practice theory draws from the work of a number of social theorists (Bourdieu, 1990; Giddens, 1984), each of whom describes how everyday practices are accomplished, reinforced, or changed (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011). The emphasis of a practice perspective on routines is therefore on the internal workings of specific routines in specific organisational contexts. On the one hand, routines consist of abstract, generalized ideas of the routine, used to refer to a certain activity or justify what people do. These are the ostensive aspects. 5 On the other hand, routines consist of “actual performances by specific people, at specific times, in specific places” (Feldman & Pentland, 2003, p.94). These are the performative aspects. In other words, the ostensive dimension is the idea, the performative dimension is the behaviour. Further, artefacts are the 5 Because there can be multiple, varying versions of the ostensive dimension, I refer to these in the plural 1