Organizations often treat unofficial routines as evidence that employees apply rules inconsistently. In sociologist Nia Calder’s study of municipal permit agencies, case-management software could not represent certain mixed-use applications, so teams added different shorthand marks and routed those files in slightly different sequences. Supervisors regarded this variation as fragmented standards. Yet clerks reassigned among teams usually understood the unfamiliar marks because each team’s routine reflected the same tacit ranking of safety and deadline concerns. Banning the routines before revising the software increased discrepancies and delays; after the software was changed to represent those shared priorities, however, the routines faded without disrupting processing.
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