How stable routines can empower varied behaviors: defining routines as organizational capacities

Abstract A principal argument in this paper is that the claimed discrepancy between (largely static) routines and their potentially varied behavioral outcomes derives principally from questionable definitions of routines based on (patterns of) behavior. Definitions based mainly on behaviors are often defective, partly because they evade the causal processes, mental states, and social relations that can give rise to the behavior. Instead, it is argued here that routines should be defined in terms of conditional dispositions or capacities, allowing analysis of how those capacities are acquired, developed, and triggered. With this dispositional approach, the apparent discrepancy between fixed routines and varied behaviors disappears, because fixed routines may have conditional elements that respond to different ways to different cues. It is argued that much discourse on routines is still affected by residues of behaviorist psychology, surviving long after its heyday in the 1960s, and even among some critics of these doctrines. The paper considers what a definition of a routine must entail, and it offers a suitable definition.