Life Histories of Innovations: How New Practices Become Routinized

A fire department in a southern city initiated a new paramedic service in 1973. Four years later, the service was so pervasive that the department avoided citywide budget cuts, and the was considered a routine part of the department's operations. Innovations like this one continually emerge in urban bureaucracies. Little is known, however, about how such practices become routinizedi.e., how they become part of standard practice. Instead, most previous research has focused on earlier steps in the innovation process, such as adoption (Rogers, 1962; and Warner, 1974) or implementation (Berman and McLaughlin, 1978). Yet, to develop a full theory of organizational innovation (Becker and Whisler, 1967; Clark and Guba, 1965; and Rowe and Boise, 1974) requires an understanding of the routinization process. In addition, policy initiatives must account for the long-term consequences of innovation and must deal with routinization. This is true whether a municipal service practice is based on new technology (e.g., Lambright and Flynn, 1977) or on organizational changes such as municipal decentralization (e.g., Yin and Yates, 1975). The routinization process was studied by examining the life histories of six types of innovations, to assure a variety of settings and bureaucratic practices:'