Purpose - What new empirical implications can emerge in organizational learning by adopting a multi-level co-evolutionary theoretical perspective? Management studies usually assume that business processes change primarily as a consequence of top management teams' decisions. By integrating both micro- and macro-level evolution and incorporating multiple level of analysis, this paper aims at shedding lights on new empirical methods in business processes' exploitation and knowledge transfer. In order to open business processes' black box a shift from the conventional routine-as-entity view to the "practice" view of routines is required. The latter theoretical approach focuses on routines' enactment and dynamics on a day-to-day basis providing an explanation on how processes are produced and reproduced over time. The practice view also implies that knowledge is not a static entity given the continuous interrelationship between and within the different levels of the organization. In particular the "habit-individual" represents our micro- level of analysis while the "routine-group" and "routine-organization" constitute our higher levels of investigation. Design/methodology/approach - To answer the research question the paper has been designed as a narrative case study. Assuming both the practice-based view and the multi-level co-evolution lenses, we applied an agent-based model to a real company operating in the service industry adopting a longitudinal analysis approach consisting exclusively of primary data. Originality/value - The methodological approach followed allows us to validate with a real case study the hypotheses and conjectures embedded in the computational model defined. Indeed while a number of scholars have developed conceptual models of business processes' evolution, few of these attempted to validate their results using actual data from organizations. The difficulty relies to the choice of the variable used to depict organizational change and knowledge transfer. Routines' variation while consistent with the entity view of firm evolution, provides only a partial interpretation of the underlying phenomenon. The longitudinal approach followed in this work, on the other hand, gives the opportunity to unpack the complexity behind emergence, development and extinction of business processes over time. Practical implications - Main results suggest that the degree of managerial control exerted, the feedback scheme applied and group interactions' mechanisms are the main determinants behind business processes' exploitation and knowledge reproduction.
