On Habit and Organizing: A Transactional Perspective Relating Firms, Consumers, and Social Institutions
提出一个基于习惯的新视角，解释企业如何利用消费者习惯并塑造其他资源提供者的习惯，从而拓展组织理论，对管理者、消费者和社会均有启示。
Habits and routines are foundational to several organizational theories. Considering organizational members to be predominately employees, established habit-based models recognize how these members’ habits help build organizations and are shaped by them. Departing from this traditional, internal focus, our paper highlights an important aspect of organizing, which has been relatively overlooked by established habit-based models, namely, how firms engineer consumer habits to their advantage and, by extension, strategically shape the habits of other key resource providers. To better theorize consumer habits and their engineering, and to integrate these phenomena within extant organizational theory, we develop a new habit-based perspective relating firms, consumers, and social institutions. Inspired by Dewey’s transactional approach and drawing on modern habit science, our transactional framework helps illuminate habit engineering, promotes a richer and more integrated view of organizing, and opens new possibilities for habit-based organizational theories. Our paper also offers several implications for firms’ managers, individual consumers, and broader society.