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Abstract The matching between organizational routines and changing environment is the key to the research on whether an organization can adapt to environmental changes. Although both the performative view of routines and the theory of organization immunity describe an initiative ability of organizations to adapt to environmental changes, both have their own shortcomings. The performative view of routines unfolds the black box of organizational routines with the aid of the distinction between the ostensive aspects and performative aspects of routines but ignores the complexity of environment in which the routines are implemented. The theory of organization immunity puts forward that organizations possess the function of immune response to environmental changes based on the theory of immunity in medical science, but it lacks the support of microscopic theory. Therefore, on the basis of the above two theories, this paper proposes the theory of organizational routines-immune response by introducing the ″generative grammar″ hypothesis which Jerne put forward in the theory of organizational immune network. On the basis of the ″immunologicalrecognition″ and ″homeostasis″ in the theory of organization immunity, we view organization as a human immune system that possesses good learning, recognition, memory and feature extraction abilities. We also make an analogy between the evolutional process of the matching of organizational routines with environmental changes and the process of immune response in which the antibodies with proper mirror images of antigen are chosen at the idiotope of antibodies by the immune system and their corresponding antigens. Besides, our theory views the evolutional process of routines as an interactive circulation pattern among the specific situations of the executive, ostensive and performative aspects of routines. Among them, the specific situations refer to those associated with the execution of routines at a certain time point when organizations continuously modify the routines to deal with the changes in environmental stress; the ostensive aspects are the combination of a series of heuristics, and the performative aspects refer to the specific behaviors that specific persons adopt at a particular time and place. We apply the three subprocedures, namely immune surveillance, immune defense and immune memory in the theory of organization immunity to summarize the path relationships among the three. Finally, this paper explains the organizational ″generative grammar″ in the new theory and organization immunity. The former is the organizational schemata that continuously guide the modification of the routines in the organization in order to deal with the environmental stress. The schemata are composed of the espoused interpretive schema that guides the routine practitioners to recognize and explain the execution of routines on environmental changes and the enacted schema that guides them to modify or develop new routines by combining the cognition and action. Both schemata will also undergo changes along with the trial-and-error learning process of organizational routines. Organization immunity is an ability to effectively recognize the environmental changes in routine executions and to generate and retain new behavioral patterns. This explanation offers a new theoretical basis for the study of the capacity of routines. The theory of organizational routines-immune response offers a brandnew perspective for the matching research between routines and the changing environment. However, two shortcomings still remain in the theory. One is that it completely ignores the important political dimension in the research on routines and the attention to the importance of power. The other one is that it also ignores the non-specific immune dimension in the original theory of organization immunity. To overcome these two shortcomings, we will try to improve our research work in the next stage.
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2014, Vol. 44 
