The emergence of a literature on evolutionary economics in the 1980s and its subsequent flowering has raised an array of questions about organizational action, selection processes, and the overall analysis of contingency and development over time in firms and industries. Some of this literature, which has drawn extensive research in management and organizational sociology, centers on the role of routines, tacit as well as explicit, and formal rules in economic and institutional practice. This conference seeks to move that discussion in a new direction, exploring historical examples of how routines (and rules) come about in the first place, with what sorts of conflicts, imperfections, and implications, how they solved and spawned problems, and how, in changing times, they came to be reinforced, to change, or to be superseded. We invite those interested in such questions and issues to join us in April at the Wharton School in Philadelphia for two days of presentations and (mainly) discussion. The tentative program is given below, also tentative discussant assignments. Please contact either of the organizers.
Phil Scranton (scranton@camden.rutgers.edu) or Dan Raff (raff@wharton.upenn.edu), for further details.

Program:
Friday, 4/19 - 9:45 Introduction
Phil Scranton (Rutgers) and Dan Raff (Wharton) Conceptualizing Organizational Routines

10:00–1:00 Session 1: Capturing Value in Large-Scale Operations

Daniel Raff (Wharton), “Information, Routines, and Value Capture in a Make-to-Stock Sector : The Early Years of the Book-of-the-Month Club”
Damon Yarnell (Dickinson College), “Behind the Line: Procurement Routines at the Ford Motor Company”
Josh Lauer (University of New Hampshire), “The Impact of Computerization on Consumer Credit Routines in the 1960s”
Juha-Antti Lamberg and Jukka Luoma (Jyvaskyla University), “Travel as Exploration and Managers as Explorers: The evolution of foreign site visit reporting in the Finnish retail industry (1945-1980)”
Comment: Dan Levinthal, Wharton

1:00-2:00 Lunch

2:00- 5:00 Session 2: Routines Facilitating Coordination Between Organizations and Within Them

Rachel Maines (Cornell), “The Nuts and Bolts of Safety: Codemaking by the Consensus Process”
DC Jackson (Lafayette College), “Rules of the Game: Dam Design & Regulation in California, 1900-1940”
Michele Alacevich (Columbia), “Designing an Operations Evaluation Function at the World Bank, 1945-1975”
Comment: Paul Nightingale, SPRU Sussex

7:00 Dinner and Keynote Presentation
Matthew Gill (Bank of England), “Rules, Routines and Financial Regulation”

Satruday, 4/20: 9:00-12:00 Session 3: Routines in Businesses Organized Around Projects

Jack Brown (Virginia), “Defining Steel and Responsibility: Testing Routines in the American Bridge Industry after the Civil War”
Martin Collins (NASM, Smithsonian), “Routines and the Case of Motorola’s Satellite
Communications Venture: The problem of the global in the 1980s & 1990s”
Meg Graham (McGill), Routine Corrupted: “The Rise and Decline of Alcoa’s Sub-Committee System”
Comment: Phil Scranton, Rutgers

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-4:00 Session 4: Routines in Addressing Poorly-Defined Problems

Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell (Stevens Institute of Technology), “The Dynamic Interplay Between Standards & Routines: AT&T in the 1920s and Auto Emissions in the 1970s”
Ann Johnson (University of South Carolina), “Creating Rules for Auto Emissions Control in the 1960s and 1970s: A Technological Perspective”
Glen Asner (Office of the Secretary of Defense, USA), “Instruments of Change: Contract Regulations as a Source of Instability in Defense Procurement, 1940-1965”
Comment: Sidney Winter, Wharton

4:00-4:30 Closing discussion