Replication of Routines and Selection in Franchise Organizations. Empirical Investigation under a Generalized Darwinism

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - General, grade: B, University of Hertfordshire, language: English, abstract: During the last decades, there has been an increasing recognition that evolutionary theory can be suitable for explaining the dynamics of organizations. Despite of the differences in the content of the distinct evolutionary approaches to organizations, and eventual punctual discordances, significant commonalities and overlaps can be observed. In this sense, support is found for hiking this way as a clear trail, but not to ride it as a rail. The use of evolutionary theories to study organizations has also led to a growing acceptance of organizational routines as a central unit of analysis, being the primary means by which they achieve their ends. Hence, to understand how organizations become stable, evolve and survive, it has become critical to first investigate the nature of the routines. Although this direction has been pointed, there are still many areas of the evolutionary quality of organizational routines that need to be clarified. Moreover, while the exploration of such topic has advanced into the conceptual arena, empirical studies are still rare and critically needed to provide more oxygen to the theoretical development on organizational routines. This research therefore seeks to be of contribution to this context. The object of the present proposal is the empirical investigation of how organizational routines are replicated in franchise organizations and how selection takes place in their context. The choice of this subject is based on the increasing importance of this type of organization, central role of routines replication in their business model, and on explicit account given to routines in their management.