Kathrin Lemm

• Organizational routines are central to understanding how work is accomplished and transformed in contemporary organizations. This cumulative dissertation, situated in the field of organization theory and grounded in routine dynamics research, explores how agility unfolds through the enactment of routines. Across four dissertation papers, it advances a processual understanding of how organizational phenomena evolve through the enactment of agile routines. The first paper conceptualizes agility as an emergent property of repeated routine performance. Drawing on routine dynamics, it theorizes how frequency and variation in agile routines generate adaptability over time, showing that becoming agile is a process rather than a state. The second paper extends this perspective to the educational context. Based on qualitative case data from agile learning routines, it identifies mechanisms of expansion and contraction that shape learning paths, demonstrating how agility in education is enacted through those recursive dynamics. The third paper connects routine dynamics with Strategyas-Practice research. It theorizes how mundane routines acquire strategic significance through “strategic connection work” – revealing strategizing as a distributed and emergent process. The fourth paper introduces the notion of truce dynamics to explain how tensions are articulated, contested, and absorbed within the everyday organizing of an agile team, and how truces are negotiated in a spiral process. Taken together, this dissertation contributes to organizational theory in four ways: (1) by further explaining agility through a routine dynamics lens; (2) by advancing a strong process ontology in organization studies that captures how stability and change co-emerge in situated action; (3) by connecting routines performances across enactments, and (4) by linking microlevel routine performances to macro-level organizational outcomes to show how local, situated actions collectively produce organizational phenomena.