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

Technology and the economy

Overview of economics of innovatio

Evolutionary Theory of Technological Change: Discussion of Missing Points and Promising Approaches

There are concerns that in order to exploit the powerful new capabilities provided by the Information Technology Era, it is necessary to advance Future-oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) of both product and process. Among these new capabilities, the FTA Methods Working Group has recently identified three main converging areas of development: complex networks, simulation modeling of complex adaptive systems (CAS), and the search of vast databases. Such convergence has rejuvenated the growth of FTA methods and practice, much in accordance with the perspective envisioned in Linstone (1999), following his optimistic view of a strong, confident technology-driven scenario, which would bring a renewed impetus toward new methods in technological forecasting. Focusing on new methods related to the new capabilities, we must borrow the discussion of methods and tools that have explosively grown in recent years in the fields of biosciences, bioinformatics and evolution. Among the needs for FTA envisioned by the FTA Methods Working Group, we find a questioning about the validity of the analogy between technological evolution and biological evolution (TFA Methods Working Group, 2004): Can artificial technological worlds be created by simulation modeling analogous to biological ones? This question is hardly a new one, and we can even trace at least a three-decade long debate on this issue. What makes the difference today, are exactly those powerful new capabilities provided by the Information Technology Era and the manifold convergence of information and molecular technologies that are contributing enormously to new insights in simulation methods and evolutionary programming. In the previously cited 30-year anniversary issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Bowonder et al (1999); briefly reviewed this topic by mainly focusing on some of the lessons learned from evolutionary theory as it anticipates changes in evolutionary trajectories, and proposed a research agenda for future research. But these authors have not considered, in detail, the new capabilities and have not identified the possible problems and obstacles that must be overcome to transform evolutionary approaches into useful forecasting tools. The present paper intends to present the state-of-the-art on this debate and to address some important considerations necessary to answer the above question. The sense one gets from the published literature on this theme is that the effort to-date has been primarily centered on the striking similarities between biological evolution and technological evolution and is mostly based on verbal theorizing. It seems that a synthesis of biology and technology remains beyond reach, with some people even doubting whether it can ever be achieved. In the following lines we intend to point out and briefly discuss some quite important aspects that have been overlooked and misinterpreted in this exciting debate

Classification of innovation considering technological interaction

Abstract. This study here categorizes innovations considering the taxonomic characteristics of interaction between technologies in complex systems. The proposed classification, in a broad analogy with the ecology, includes four categories of technology considering the typology of their interaction: 1) technological parasitism is a relationship between two technologies A and B in which A benefits from the interaction with B, whereas B has a negative side from interaction with A; 2) technological commensalism is a relationship between technologies where technology A benefits from B without affecting it; 3) technological mutualism is a relationship in which technologies A and B benefit from the activity of the other; finally, 4) technological symbiosis is a long-term interaction between A and B technologies that generates coevolution in complex systems. This classification can predict evolutionary pathways of technologies. This study here begins the process of clarifying typologies of interactive technologies that explain the long-run evolution of technology. The theoretical framework can be a ground work for development of more sophisticated theories to clarify technological change.Keywords. Classification of innovation, Technological interaction, Technical change, Technological evolution, Evolution of technology, Complex systems.JEL. B50, B59, O30, O33, O39

Darwinian Evolutionary Ideas in Business Economics and Organization Studies

This thesis is a study of the use of Darwinian evolutionary ideas in business economics and organization studies. Mindful of the explosion of evolutionary rhetoric in the socio-economic domain over the last three decades and informed by the modern generalized Darwinian perspective, the research has been focused on the evaluation of the precise nature and extent of use of Darwinian ideas in three of the most influential evolutionary accounts in these disciplines. Notably, Nelson and Winter’s Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982), Hannan and Freeman’s Organizational Ecology (1989), and Howard Aldrich’s Organizations Evolving (1999). It is a work of comparative theory. Also since 1980, theoretical and conceptual advances in evolutionary theory confirmed the generic nature of Darwinian theory and provided generalized terms for its articulation. Whilst some major criticisms of Darwinism are easily dismissed, significantly scholars have shown that Lamarckian acquired character inheritance must be accommodated within the meta-theoretical framework of Darwinism. This study shows that whilst the damaging rhetoric of ‘Social Darwinism’ continues to discourage widespread active engagement with Darwinian theory, the pervasive implicit or ‘covert’ adoption of Darwinian ideas by social scientists nevertheless clearly endorses its general nature, confirms a Darwinian social ontology and underlines the inevitability of Darwinism in the socio-cultural domain. Following a detailed exposition of general Darwinism, this study presents a forensic comparative evaluation of the evolutionary theories under study, highlighting theoretical gaps and inconsistencies, and demonstrating their resolution within the Darwinian framework. Through the systematic application and dissection of these disparate theories, one of which is labelled ‘Lamarckian’, the analysis shows the deep extent to which they all are Darwinian. And furthermore, underlining the promise of the Darwinian system for yielding further results, the study clearly illustrates the importance of the explicit adoption of modern Darwinian concepts for helping scholars to understand the complex evolutionary processes they seek to explai

An Evolutionary Account of Technological Development

If 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution' (Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1973) , then, does nothing in technology make sense except in the light of evolution? This study will seek to construct an evolutionary account of technological development. To this end, it will consider and analyse a variety of theoretical proposals. In this thesis I will survey existing evolutionary accounts found in socio-cultural and engineering sciences, and will evaluate how these theories have been formulated. The study will look at evidence and theory, and it will consider the formalisation, visualisation and conceptualisation of ancestral-descent relationships in socio-technical systems. In recent years, this area of study has gained momentum among experts from different academic, scientific and theoretical backgrounds, particularly those working in the fields of theoretical and engineering science, technology, and in the development of social-technical systems. 21st century biologists, social scientists, philosophers, economists, and technologists have instigated lively and thought-provoking interdisciplinary discussions about the feasibility of quantifying and modelling macro and microevolution in technology. Neo-Darwinian theory and modern synthesis theory have prepared a framework for a more effective discussion than ever before. The question asked by many researchers in this area is how microevolution can bring about macro evolutionary events in socio-technical systems. However, any evolutionary account of technology requires the application of conceptual tools and special theoretical foundations for study that do not necessarily match those traditionally used in the study of the organic world. Therefore, to address how microevolution can influence macroevolution in technological design, it is important to establish an evolutionary account of modular systems in technology in order to depict the patterns and processes that have evolved over time in the process of design. The main principles that govern Darwin’s evolutionary scheme according to natural selection suggest that every system in nature uses variation, reproduction and heritability in order to evolve. The simplicity of the general principles that govern the theory of evolution in biology has enabled it to be generalised as a theoretical framework in other academic and research fields. However, the existence of directionality and intentionality in the production of artefacts makes it necessary to extend the definition of, and to re-examine, evolutionary mechanisms and classic notions of synthesis. For example, Simondon's theory of concretization considers the horizontal transmission of technicality in systems. Additionally, Baldwin and Clark argue that the theory of modularity is a powerful conceptual tool which can be used in different fields, and this theory sheds light on how extended evolutionary operators work in technological systems. It is possible to find similarities between evolution in natural history and the developmental history of modern technology. Historical objects in the two fields are connected together through the idea of reproductive descent. This thesis will investigate how the unit of selection affects the process of evolution and the hierarchical classification of modular systems, and how evolutionary mechanisms bring about evolutionary change in design space through time. It will explore how different evolutionary operators interact to cause 'phenotypic' effects. The main challenge of the thesis will be to explain developmental patterns found in socio-technical systems, and in the biological selective regime, into an extended synthesis. To this end, a scientific investigation of shared research is required, and emphasis will be placed on how this unifying approach can delineate evolutionary mechanisms, functional theory and evolutionary methodology of design, evolutionary operators, and phenotypic-genotypic distinction in technology. It is apparent that evolutionary theory can be used for theoretical planning in the growth and development of technical-social systems. The basic principles of Darwin’s theory of evolution notes that each system (which can), under a selective regime, achieves properties including variation, reproduction and heritability, in order that the system can evolve. Academics who study the growth and development of technology in the context of an evolutionary-historical process often use the idea of genetic transfer for inspiration