"“There’s got to be a better way”: Aspirations, constraints, and the discovery of new routines"

Research on organizational decision-making suggests that choice is shaped by attempts to match available resources with solvable problems. Research also suggests that over time, choices that emerge from this process become organizational routines i.e. repetitive patterns of interdependent organizational actions, which form the basis of predictable patterns or ‘production techniques’. Within the framework of evolutionary economics, production techniques evolve by the variation, selection, and retention of underlying routines by decision makers. In this paper we investigate the triggers of variation in routines. We argue that as decision makers are boundedly rational, they are not aware of all the possible alternatives when selecting a known routine to execute organizational processes, and that decision makers are more likely to search for better routines when there is a subsequent mismatch between available resources and desired outcomes. We propose and experimentally examine the effect of high aspirations...