Routine in Business Organizations - Essay Example

A routine is defined as a habit of doing something in a particular order. The pattern of routines in a family calls for a core routine which is followed daily such as waking up, taking breakfast, getting ready for work or school. These routines become almost automatic and take a lot of discipline. Routine is usually considered as a plane or a timetable that determines your day, week or yearly activities. One can take note of the time and the activities that need to be accomplished during those planned times.

Therefore, routines are commonplace tasks, chores or duties that must be done regularly, or at specified intervals, typical or in everyday activities. In this literature review a critical examination of the context of routine, its use and application in business organizations as well as in the field of psychology where routine is sometimes integral to the intervention strategies, is explored. Also included in this review is the model of routines applied in management and psychology. It is imperative that a clear understanding of the concept of routine be derived from previous research.

Hodgson, in his critical analysis of Nelson and Winter's "Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change" (1982), found that the authors sometimes defined routine as genotypes or attributable to dispositions and sometimes it is defined as phenotypes or attributed to behavior (363).. He presents genotypes as "the generative rule" that includes "the forms, rules, procedures, conventions, strategies, and technologies" that are "inherent in ingrained individual habits and in organizational routines." (364) Hence, habits and dispositions are conditional, dependent on the generative mechanisms that produce behavior.

The appropriate definition for routine would be: "A routine is an executable capability for repeated performance in some context that [has] been learned by an organization in response to selective pressures." Therefore, routines in the management case are potentialities, not behavior.In the world of psychology today, psychoanalysis is specifically and centrally about those 'murky concepts'. Over the last couple of years cognitive psychology has become focused of the study of emotion made by philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientist rather than traditional cognitive scientists.

Another alternative to psychoanalysis is socio-biology; a subtler and more promising form called Darwinian Psychology, also uses evolutionary variable to explain human behaviour which focuses on emotion though their descriptions are ingrained from intuition theories and are articulated from different ways of reacting to struggle for survival. These explanations are all speculation, which are not necessarily true factors (Young, 2008). Another down point with psychology and routine is that psychologists seem to have no greater interest in routine and scheduling, when they should have because of the high impact it plays on human's life and behaviour.

One can learn a lot concerning the human mind, behaviour, and the social aspects of behaviour as well. But there are no focuses on how routine can affect ones' behaviour, life style, and even the impact of stress. Surprisingly, the bulk of research deals with only a small number or routine- related topics. Many of today's psychology articles on routine focuses on broad topics like the impact of routine in the work