routines

In organisational theory, organisational routines are "repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions carried out by multiple actors".
In evolution and evolutionary economics routines serve as social replicators – mechanisms that help to maintain organisational behaviors and knowledge. In the theory of organisational learning, routines serve as a sort of memory, especially of uncodified, tacit knowledge. In strategic management, especially in the resource-based view of firms, organisational routines form the microfoundations of organisational capabilities and dynamic capabilities.
Despite the extensive usage of the routines concept in the research literature, there is still much debate about organisational routines. For example, scholars see them both as a source of stability and as a driver of organisational change. In an attempt to better understand the "inside" of organisational routines, Pentland and Feldman offered the distinction between the ostensive and performative aspects of routines. The latter refers to the actual actions performed by actors, while the former often refers to some abstract "script" that represent that routines more abstractly. Cohen and Bacdayan showed that from a cognitive perspective, routines are stored as procedural memory (and not declarative, for example), and hence it is not likely that there is script that codifies routines. In contrast, some scholars have likened routines to grammars of actions.

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