Implementing Routine across a Large-Scale Writing Program

Common sense says that a routine by definition is fixed, unchanging. That commonsense view of routine held in the field of organizational science until fairly recently, when researchers such as Pentland and Reuter (1994) pointed out that people perform routines and that people have agency. Because people, as Feldman (2000) writes, “think and feel and care” (p. 614), routines change. Pentland and Feldman (2005) put it this way: “Routines are continuously emerging systems with internal structures and dynamics. The internal structure of a routine can produce a wide range of different outcomes on the continuum between ‘very stable’ and ‘constantly changing,’ depending on the circumstances” (pp. 794–795). Disciplines Comparative Philosophy | English Language and Literature | Logic and Foundations of Mathematics | Philosophy of Mind Comments This article is published as Mackiewicz, J., Aune, J.E. , Implementing Routine across a Large-Scale Writing Program. ” Writing Across the Curriculum 28 (2017): 75–105. Posted with permission. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/engl_pubs/234 75 Implementing Routine across a Large-Scale Writing Program JO MACKIEWICZ AND JEANINE E. AUNE Common sense says that a routine by definition is fixed, unchanging. That commonsense view of routine held in the field of organizational science until fairly recently, when researchers such as Pentland and Reuter (1994) pointed out that people perform routines and that people have agency. Because people, as Feldman (2000) writes, “think and feel and care” (p. 614), routines change. Pentland and Feldman (2005) put it this way: “Routines are continuously emerging systems with internal structures and dynamics. The internal structure of a routine can produce a wide range of different outcomes on the continuum between ‘very stable’ and ‘constantly changing,’ depending on the circumstances” (pp. 794–795). In other words, any routine—including one within a writing program—is an “ongoing accomplishment” (Feldman, 2000, p. 613). Routines are just as much verbs as they are nouns. We argue here that a large-scale writing program such as the Advanced Communication program at Iowa State University, like any organization, thrives best when it functions with routine. At Iowa State on an annual basis, over 4,300 students enroll in one of the four courses that comprise the Advanced Communication (AdvComm) program in order to fulfill a graduation requirement for an upper-level communication course. Which of the four courses students choose depends on the course or courses that their program or department has specified as best meeting their needs. With already high and steadily growing enrollments, we set out to institute routine across the 200-plus sections of the program’s four courses that the English Department offers annually. Our conceptualization of routine derives from the organizational-science theory of routines posited by Feldman (2000), Feldman and Pentland (2003), and others. The field of organizational science, according to Feldman and Pentland (2005), tries to answer questions such as these: “How can we explain organizational stability, change, and survival? What promotes (or inhibits) learning, flexibility, and adaptation within organizations? ” (p. 793). Routines, they write, “are not the only factor that may influence these phenomena,” but “they are widely recognized as critical to all these issues, and more” (p. 793). As the codirectors of the AdvComm program, we sought to implement routine in order to balance stability and change. Routine, as Feldman and Pentland (2003, 2005) conceptualize it, comprises two components: