A Generalized Darwinism Perspective on Changes in Individuals’ Use of Information Systems

Information Systems (IS) play a critical role in supporting business processes within organizations. There is concern however that IS underutilization by individuals is hindering efforts to exploit its benefits and infuse it into workplace practices. To extract the benefits from an IS requires users to change how they incorporate the IS in their work, progressing towards deeper use. This paper draws on evolutionary theory, that is, Generalized Darwinism and its principles of variation, selection and retention, motivational theory and findings from a case study and survey to better understand how individuals’ IS use change over time. Furthermore, it discusses the impact of change on deep use, in particular, extended use. Moreover, the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and feedback as triggers of change are highlighted. The findings provide useful insights that further our understanding of post-adoption IS use and the mechanisms by which IS use changes over time

Untangling the Conceptual Isssues Raised in Reydon and Scholz’s Critique of Organizational Ecology and Darwinian Populations

Reydon and Scholz raise doubts about the Darwinian status of organizational ecology by arguing that Darwinian principles are not applicable to organizational populations. Although their critique of organizational ecology’s typological essentialism is correct, they go on to reject the Darwinian status of organizational populations. This paper claims that the distinction between replicators and interactors, raised in modern philosophy of biology but not discussed by Reydon and Scholz, points the way forward for organizational ecologists. It is possible to conceptualise evolving Darwinian populations providing the inheritance mechanism is appropriately specified. By this approach, adaptation and selection are no longer dichotomised, and the evolutionary significance of knowledge transmission is highlightedPeer reviewe

A Neo-Darwinian Foundation of Evolutionary Economics. With an Application to the Theory of the Firm.

The focus of evolutionary economics is a process of continuous economic and organizational change. Currently there is no agreement on the explanation of economic evolution. Rather there are competing interpretations. To achieve a common understanding of economic evolution, from the perspective of the history of economic thought, at first the theoretical approaches of Schumpeter and Marshall with regard to economic development or evolution are dealt with. After that, a concept of socio-economic evolution in broad agreement with evolution in nature is elaborated. It is summed up in the version of a generalized Darwinism. In this, evolution is seen as a process of change that leads to the adaptation of complex systems, the result of the causal interaction among variation, selection and retention of variety. As a (slightly) different interpretation the presently predominating approach of neo-Schumpeterian evolutionary economics is presented. It has gained wide application to the theory of innovation and later - based on Penrose - to resource-based theories of the firm. In this the dynamic process of the creation and exploitation of resources, mainly knowledge, turns out to be the centre of attention of an evolutionary theory of the firm.Economic evolution, Schumpeter and Marshall, Generalized Darwinism, Evolutionary theory of the firm

Exploring Evolutionary Economic Geographies

Evolutionary approaches in economics have gathered increasing support over the last 25 years. Despite an impressive body of literature, economists are still far from formulating a coherent research paradigm. The multitude of approaches in evolutionary economics poses problems for the development of an evolutionary economic geography. For the most part, evolutionary economic geography imports selective concepts from evolutionary biology and economics and applies those concepts to specific problems within economic geography. We discuss a number of problems with this approach and suggest that a more powerful and appealing alternative requires the development of theoretically consistent models of evolutionary processes. This paper outlines the contours of an evolutionary model of economic dynamics where economic agents are located in different geographical spaces. We seek to show how competition between those agents, based on the core evolutionary principles of variety, selection and retention, may produce distinct economic regions sharing properties that differentiate them from competitors elsewhere. These arguments are extended to illustrate how the emergent properties of economic agents and places co-evolve and lead to different trajectories of economic development over space.evolutionary economics, economic geography, Generalized Darwinism, biological metaphors, self-organization

Unnatural Selection: A new formal approach to punctuated equilibrium in economic systems

Generalized Darwinian evolutionary theory has emerged as central to the description of economic process (e.g., Aldrich et. al., 2008). Here we demonstrate that, just as Darwinian principles provide necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for understanding the dynamics of social entities, in a similar manner the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory provide another set of necessary conditions that constrain the evolution of socioeconomic process. These latter constraints can, however, easily be formulated as a statistics-like analytic toolbox for the study of empirical data that is consistent with a generalized Darwinism, and this is no small thing

Naturalizing institutions: Evolutionary principles and application on the case of money

In recent extensions of the Darwinian paradigm into economics, the replicator-interactor duality looms large. I propose a strictly naturalistic approach to this duality in the context of the theory of institutions, which means that its use is seen as being always and necessarily dependent on identifying a physical realization. I introduce a general framework for the analysis of institutions, which synthesizes Searle's and Aoki's theories, especially with regard to the role of public representations (signs) in the coordination of actions, and the function of cognitive processes that underly rule-following as a behavioral disposition. This allows to conceive institutions as causal circuits that connect the population-level dynamics of interactions with cognitive phenomena on the individual level. Those cognitive phenomena ultimately root in neuronal structures. So, I draw on a critical restatement of the concept of the meme by Aunger to propose a new conceptualization of the replicator in the context of institutions, namely, the replicator is a causal conjunction between signs and neuronal structures which undergirds the dispositions that generate rule-following actions. Signs, in turn, are outcomes of population-level interactions. I apply this framework on the case of money, analyzing the emotions that go along with the use of money, and presenting a stylized account of the emergence of money in terms of the naturalized Searle-Aoki model. In this view, money is a neuronally anchored metaphor for emotions relating with social exchange and reciprocity. Money as a meme is physically realized in a replicator which is a causal conjunction of money artefacts and money emotions. --Generalized Darwinism,institutions,replicator/interactor,Searle,Aoki,naturalism,memes,emotions,money

Changes in Post-Adoption Use of Information Systems

As organizations continue to invest heavily in Information Systems (IS) to support business processes, the under-utilization of such IS is a key concern that challenges efforts to exploit its benefits. What is most desirable is for users to engage in forms of deep use that effectively leverage the features of the IS for work tasks. But, too often users minimize their interactions with the IS. Yet for users how they use an IS often changes over time to become progressively deeper as the IS is embedded more in the performance of various tasks. To understand how IS use changes over time, this research-in-progress paper draws on principles of evolutionary change, that is, Generalized Darwinism, and reports the findings from a series of case studies

The firm as Darwin Machine: an evolutionary view oforganizational knowledge and learning

This paper argues that an evolutionary view of learning provides an explanatory logic forknowledge-based and capabilities-based theories of the firm. The paper develops a rigorous treatmentof organizational learning as an evolutionary process on the basis of the notion of ‘generalizedDarwinism’ and its application to knowledge. A Darwinian view of organizational learningdemonstrates the logical imperative of distinguishing between organizational knowledge andorganizational capabilities, and of understanding organizational learning in terms of the interplaybetween them. Work by Nelson and Winter, Penrose, and Burgelman is reinterpreted in Darwinianterms and implications for the nature of organizational capabilities and the locus of organizationalknowledge are derived