Grammar has been used metaphorically to describe organizational processes, but the metaphor has never been systematically developed so that it can be applied in empirical research. This paper develops the grammatical metaphor into a rigorous model for describing and theorizing about...

Routineness is a central concepts in organizational theory and design and is widely understood as a product of low task variety and high task analyzability. Standardized scales to measure these dimensions been developed and shown to be reliable, but preliminary results reported here suggest the...

This paper explores the sequential structure of work processes in a task unit whose work involves high numbers of exceptions, low analyzability of search, frequent interruptions and extensive deliberation, and cannot be characterized as routine under any traditional definition. Yet a detailed...

Organizations are under increasing pressure to redesign core organizational processes. This paper describes the ways in which the Process Handbook (Malone, Crowston, Lee, and Pentland, 1993) can be used to describe and redesign business processes. The Process Handbook is an electronic database...

This paper describes a data collection methodology for business process analysis. Unlike static objects, business processes are semi-repetitive sequences of events that are often widely distributed in time and space, with ambiguous boundaries. To redesign or even just describe a business process...