More on word frequencies of 'habit' and 'routine'

A little more fooling around with google's Ngram tool produced this interesting plot of frequencies of the phrases 'my habit', 'our habit', 'my routine', and 'our routine', from 1800-2000 in their sample of one million English books.

  
   



I chose these search phrases out of interest in whether 'habit' and 'routine' differ historically in their individual or collective connotations. The interesting result is that 'habit' has more often been mine than ours, while routine has more often been ours than mine. I take this as a suggestion that the collective connotation is stronger for 'routine' and the individual one is stronger for 'habit', though each clearly has a substantial frequency in its «minority» connotation.

This link, http://tinyurl.com/habit-routine , will let you reproduce the query, examine specific examples of the usage from different eras, and try other queries.

What 'organization' used to mean

In mid-June I spoke at a meeting in Helsinki on “Micro-origins (or, in some titles,  'Micro-foundations') of Routines and Capabilities".  There is a substantial literature – and community – around the topic of organizational capabilities, with the idea that routines are a large component of what organizations are able to do, and therefore we might not expect firms to behave like rational individuals.  This is a congenial perspective for economists who are dissatisfied the conventional theory of the firm.

Nearly every participant hoped to be illuminating some aspect of organizational capabilities.  I thought a while about this phrase and found myself noticing that it is actually somewhat redundant.  ‘To organize’, after all, means to create capabilities (organs, which are instruments, tools, or capabilities to perform functions).  So an organization already is a set of capabilities, and the language we use – without attending to that root sense – actually means something like “the capabilities of a system of capabilities”.  There’s nothing wrong, of course with saying “organizational capabilities” to draw attention to the capabilities themselves and away from the system they constitute.  Still, the invisibility of the redundancy did provide a clear reminder of how far into our mental background the root meaning of ‘organization’ has receded.  

Tina Dacin's ICOS talk on Cambridge High Table

Tina Dacin of Queens University just gave the ICOS talk on research she's been doing that came out of her sabbatical year at Cambridge. She was fascinated by high table,  the very formal dining traditions within each of the colleges for students, fellows and the college master, with the fellows and master having their own table - often literally on a raised platform in the hall.

She brought out lots of interesting issues about the various functions of these highly-scripted activities: for maintaining universities over time, for affecting social mobility and for reproducing British class consciousness. But the aspect that seems relevant for this blog was her classification of high table as a ritual.

I was of two minds about the choice of that term. Tina has been studying the background scholarship - she started off by listing, among many others, Richard Schechner, Maurice Halbwachs, and Victor Turner, so she probably chose 'ritual' carefully. And that's a term we often use when we want to indicate that things are tightly constrained by norms.  But I also have the idea that to be a ritual a collective activity needs to be efficacious. Marriage, the eucharist, baptism, animal sacrifice and the like actually transform the status of either the universe or some of the participants. If done properly they propitiate the gods, or make you really married. This is part of why it is especially important that they are done correctly.

But at high table, while there is a lot at stake for newbies trying to follow the complex conventions of which fork to use, or which form of address, there isn't really a transformation being effected, as I understand it. (An exception might be those once-a-month occasions when new fellows are inducted into a college. Then someone really is made a fellow.) At a regular dinner, if someone does something that simply "isn't done" (as Dacin noted she was told at one point when she wanted to leave the table to greet a fellow Canadian) it doesn't follow that the purpose of the evening's activity wasn't properly accomplished. In contrast, if the groom doesn't say "I do" at the wedding there are much deeper repercussions.

Wondering about whether I would use 'ritual' (and thinking maybe not), got me thinking about whether I would use 'routine' instead. High table certainly seems like the sort of activities that have been labeled "recurring action patterns" of organizations. But trying to be careful about the terms used within that broad category raises the question of whether very scripted social occasions like high table, conducted regularly within an organization like a Cambridge college, are properly called 'routines'.

It seems like the production of the meal for the participants by the staff would qualify. Dacin went over things like chefs and kitchens and silver-polishing that all have to be mobilized to bring it off every evening.

But what about just filing out to the table in the proper order, wearing your academic gown, eating, drinking and making small talk according to the local social rules? Is a fellow who does that many nights per week engaged in a routine? Is a routine like a ritual, in the classic (efficacious) sense of the term: requiring that a participant feels that correct performance is required to successfully accomplish some larger goal? If so, then maybe high table is not a routine either.

I guess I lean toward the idea that an action pattern could be a routine without meeting the stronger requirements for using 'ritual'. So maybe one could say that Dacin is actually studying the dining routine at Cambridge in the way that Martha Feldman studied the budgeting routine at the university housing office where she did her field work. It could be important to its being a routine that there is some purpose to the activity - in this case that would be dining - but maybe it's not actually a ritual since, with the exception of inductions, no major transformation is accomplished and violations of norms only embarrass the participants involved.

About the title…

It's my hope that the title phrase is meaningful in three senses:

1. It's a common usage. We label as ‘routine’ any of the myriad recurring activities that we can accomplish with little thought. These actions that seem hardly to demand our serious attention are Routine Matters. Their nature the subject matter of the blog.
2. The topic may seem dull, but the issues presented by the study of routine and other recurring action patterns could not be more fundamental for our working life, our friendships and family relations, our approaches to education and research – even our national political economy. In this sense the title urges careful examination of what we often take for granted: Routine [Really] Matters [!].
3. There is also the sense conveyed more precisely by printing the title as ‘Routine’ Matters. How we use the term is tightly bound up with the problems we are having when we try to understand recurring action patterns. We may become able to see more clearly if we can free ourselves from the impoverished image that we carry along when we presume that routine activities are always mundane in content, rigidly invariant in execution, and isolated from thought or feeling.