Perceiving and Remembering Routine Action: Fundamental Micro‐Level Origins

Abstract

In the contemporary research literatures on organization and on business strategy, routine is understood to be a distinct modality of organizational action – not merely the joint result of individuals making choices that maximize self-interest. As Herbert Simon (1996) pointed out, if this were not so, the observed stability of routines would merely be a reflection of the stable requirements of the environment within which individuals would be optimizing their behaviour. When the environment changed, behaviour would quickly follow and we should not expect routine’s notorious ‘resistance to change’. However, this special issue affirms that routine is a distinctive mode of organizational action, and the title phrase ‘micro-level origins’ directs us to closer observation of the underlying individual processes that generate routine action. Correspondingly, the assumptions about those micro-level processes that we put into our theories of routine will shape theoretical derivation of the expected properties of routine action, and of the organizations whose distinctive capabilities (Dosi et al., 2000; Teece et al., 1997) rest on routine. Observation, theory, and theory-based intervention will all be affected by more accurate foundational assumptions. My central assertion is that the distinctiveness of the routine mode of action stems from its being grounded in an ensemble of individual psychological processes that may be grouped together with the broad term habit (Neal and Wood, 2008; Neal et al., 2006; Rangel, 2009; Redish et al., 2008; Yin and Knowlton, 2006). It is the relationship of organizational routine action to the individual habit system that I would urge researchers to investigate. The full development of the relationship and its implications will not be simple. Habit is subtly connected to systems of emotion. It is different from, but can arise from, more deliberate and conscious action (Graybiel, 2008). And while habits can verge on