Organizational routines

In organizational theory, organizational routines are repetitive patterns of interdependent actions in an organization from various perspectives.

Routines are “repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors”. They are a mechanism that can explain how work gets done in organizations, how organizations accumulate and represent knowledge, how they pass this knowledge between and within organizational units, and how they adapt and respond to changing situations. Routines have been used in evolutionary economics and more generally in generalized evolutionary theory as a social replicator – a mechanism that acts like biological genes in that it can pass (or replicate) certain behaviors and knowledge. It has also been used in the research literature on organizational learning, serving as a sort of “memory”, especially of uncodified, tacit knowledge. In the strategic management research literature, especially in the area of resource-based view of firms, organizational routines are often used as the microfoundations of organizational capabilities and dynamic capabilities. Despite the extensive usage of the routines concept in the research literature there is still much debate about organizational routines. For example, scholars see them both as a source of stability, but at the same time as a driver of organizational change. In an attempt to better understand the “inside” of organizational routines Pentland and Feldman offered the distinction between the ostensive and performative aspects of routines. The latter refers to the actual actions performed by actors while the former often refers to some abstract “script” that represent that routines more abstractly. Cohen & Bacdayan showed in a neat experiment that from a cognitive perspective, routines rae stored as procedural memory (and not declarative, for example), and hence it is not likely that there is script that codifies routines. In contrast, some scholars have likened routines to grammars of actions.

"Organisational economists" tend to consider routines as a ‘black box’ and they are primarily focused on the purpose behind routines and their effect on performance. On the other hand "organisation theorists" focus on routines in terms of practice – how routines operation, how they are reproduced and how they change while enacting them. Despite the considerable work in both organisational economics and organisation theory, researchers in each appear to have parallel discussions. This can be attributed to the attention to different analysis levels, with the capabilities viewpoint addressing the whole entity and the practice viewpoint addressing the routine parts. This communication gap is also attributed to the different primary explanations provided by both streams of perspectives with the capabilities stream focused on the way routines impact organisational performance and the practice perspective focused on the internal dynamics of the organisation.

...
Wikipedia