Le concept de "routine organisationelle" entre cognition et institution

Abstract

The concept of organisational routine was advanced by Nelson and Winter in 1982 to explain the behavior of the firms from the evolutionary point of view. The thesis proposes an interpretation and redefinition of the concept which makes it possible to integrate in the routine itself the institutional dimension of the economy. The routine is attached to a principle general of explanation of the behavior, in terms of habits. This principle applied to the organizations results in distinguishing from the “repertories” of routines (or deposits) which memorize productive knowledge located, (2) and the current performances or “routines in act” which are the expression in a certain context. Knowledge thus stored is articulated or tacit, and this aspect of the theory separates this approach from other theories of organization (Simon, March, Cyert, etc). the routines make it possible to explain the overall performance of the firm on an assumption of truce of the “intra-organisational conflict”, because the truce maintains the whole of the members of the organization within the framework of the circuit of routines registered in the repertories. While raising this assumption, one leads to a redefinition of the organisational routines according to two dimensions, cognitive and social. The repertories crystallize then also of the social relations, which once stabilized become institutions. The cognitive one and the institutional one does not concern same logics of formation, which obliges to differently consider the processes of transformation of organisational routines.