Board Activity as Routines

Abstract

In this chapter we aim to provide a view of organizational settings that shares similar decision characteristics to those of boards. This might be helpful for investigating the relevance of management cognition in decision-making. We address the issue of cognition through the concept of routines and their relevance for understanding decision-making processes. Another crucial issue we explore here is attention, leading to awareness of crisis itself. In the current economic crisis, only when decision makers became aware that this crisis situation was ‘nonstandard’, that is, a situation where existing organizational routines failed to confront crisis, did they enter into a more innovative search mode. Not surprisingly, boardrooms tried initially to apply traditional recipes as the standard operating procedures at the outset of crisis. It was a long time before many at the organizational apex (and the majority of external observers) noticed that the nature of crisis was dissimilar to other previous recession situations—and realized that this was probably the most intense in nature after the Great Depression.