ABSTRACT
Ideas about routines or rule-bound behaviour are used increasingly in attempts to understand the behaviour of organisations. Routines are seen, at a common-sense level, as predetermined, unchanging patterns of behaviour exemplified by the kind of activities which workers carry out on production lines. Thus, passing partially completed sets of components from one worker to another, with each adding a small contribution to the finished product, is the common image of routine. A broader definition is more helpful, however, since the idea of a routine is generally used in the analysis of behaviour which requires some thought even though the behaviour may be, in some senses, automatic. A stimulus may prompt the firm towards a particular form of analysis or other form of complex behaviour. The behaviour is routine in the sense that those sorts of problems are always analysed in that way but it is not simple. Here the concept of routine is used to look at the taken-for-grantedness of behaviour and it has close links with the concepts of institutions and culture.
