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Routines form the core engine of firms, organisations and markets and their significance is well-recognized in organizational behaviour. From the viewpoint of evolution, the importance of routines is evidenced in firms’ reproduction while from the viewpoint of resource-based theory, routines add to the firm’s dynamic capability and their regenerating ability. They are important to the ability of the firm to adapt to the dynamic situations or otherwise. Majority of theories dedicated to routines have conceptualized them as stable. Such theories have their basis on routines related to individual habits, computer programs or genes. However, conceptualizations such as these mitigate the role of agency in the organisational routines. In other words, the need for organisational participants to think is minimized by the cognitive efficiency and decreased complexity related to routines. To this end, organisational routines are described as the relatively mindless repetition of actions that have been well-established via evolution or voluntary design of an individual that is not a participant to it. Despite the fact that routines have often been related to stability and inertia, scholars have evidenced their relationship to the adaptation, evolution, change, innovation, versatility, improvisation and learning of an organisation. There are many ways where in organisational routines have been understood to enable the display of stability and change despite the fact that understanding both may seem to be different sides to the same coin. To this end, scholars employ the concept of cognitive efficiency to shed a light on stability and change and introduce exogenous shocks that are significantly large and may counter the advantages of cognitive efficiency generated by the organisational routines. Exogenous shocks cover adaptation to changed or novel situations and adjustment towards technological change. Some other scholars shed a light on stability and change from the perspective of evolution. In this regard, stability arises owing to the maintenance and reproduction of work routines while change arises via mutation, incomplete copying or introduction of variation. Added to this, the performative view point also stresses on the performances role or the people’s actions take that generates the abstract notion of the routine in an organisation, or play in what people’s perception of what they are doing while enacting organisational routines. The dynamism lies in the recursive relationship between understandings and performance as underlined in practice or in theory. The performance generates and regenerates the understandings while the latter limit and allow performances. According to Feldman and Pentland, the mechanisms that guide, refer and account, assist in producing legitimate performance changes that create, maintain and modify the routine concept. Such mechanisms can explain the way routines change and why they change. Therefore, from the performative viewpoint, the change mechanisms and the stability mechanisms are one and the same thing. ==Definition== Scholars who dedicated their work to the study of how organisations work define the concept of routines as repetitive patterns of interdependent actions in the organisation from various perspectives. Nevertheless, the concept has been described based on its different aspects based on the study approach. For instance, organisational economists have a tendency to consider routines as a ‘black box’ and they are primarily focused on the purpose behind routines and their effect on performance. Individuals who have training in organisation theory focus on routines in terms of practice – how routines operation, how they are reproduced and how they change while enacting them. Such various viewpoints of capabilities and practice are respectively informed by organisational economics and organisation theory. Despite the considerable work in both, 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. Both streams also have distinct theoretical assumptions with the capabilities viewpoint based on economics while the practice viewpoint based on sociology. Regardless of their differences, a thorough review of studies in both areas highlighted some significant findings and common themes. Both streams stresses on paying attention to individuals, the role of tacit knowledge and the fact that routines are stable and changing. Added to this is the significance of context in comprehending the growth of routines operation and their outcomes for the performance of the firm. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Organisational routines」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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