Darwinism, organizational evolution and survival: key challenges for future research

How do social organizations evolve? How do they adapt to environmental pressures? What resources and capabilities determine their survival within dynamic competition? Charles Darwin’s seminal work The Origin of Species (1859) has provided a significant impact on the development of the management and organization theory literatures on organizational evolution. This article introduces the JMG Special Issue focused on Darwinism, organizational evolution and survival. We discuss key themes in the organizational evolution research that have emerged in recent years. These include the increasing adoption of the co-evolutionary approach, with a particular focus on the definition of appropriate units of analysis, such as routines, and related challenges associated with exploring the relationship between co-evolution, re-use of knowledge, adaptation, and exaptation processes. We then introduce the three articles that we have finally accepted in this Special Issue after an extensive, multi-round, triple blind-review process. We briefly outline how each of these articles contributes to understanding among scholars, practitioners and policy makers of the continuous evolutionary processes within and among social organizations and systems

Associating, mobilizing, politicizing : local developmental agency from without

First published : January 2013Decades of increase in external aid programs sparked a wide range of criticisms pointing to misaligned interests, lack of accountability, and the reproduction of developmental traps. The success of development from without is more likely if it generates domestic developmental agency. In this article, we contribute by conceptualizing and measuring dimensions of developmental agency. Our research analyzes the strategic case of European Union regional development programs in Eastern Europe, where this external organization spent nearly a decade on establishing local developmental agency. We collected survey data of 1200 local organizations from two regions each in Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. We examine the post-accession position of organizations that participated in pre-accession assistance programs. We test a hypothesis of marginalization in the framework of recentralized developmental governance, and we examine links between patterns of pre-accession involvement and post-accession developmental agency. We identify factors that might make external developmental programs more likely to foster local developmental agency

Challenges and trends in comparative higher education: an editorial

[Introduction] International comparative higher education research has proliferated since its institutionalization as an interdisciplinary field in the 1960s and 1970s (Jarausch 1985) and has gained special momentum in the 1990s (Teichler 1996). On the one hand, the benefits of comparative research approaches in international higher education have been repeatedly emphasized (Altbach and Kelly 1985; Teichler 1996; Rhoades 2001). These include, for example, increasing the capacity to generalize about a greater number of units under analysis, the capacity of a systematic comparison to illuminate the dynamics of a particular system better than a single-system study as well as highlighting knowledge gaps. On the other hand, methodological debates about comparing higher education internationally and how best to compare them emerged hand-in-hand with the field’s growth in popularity. Although the logic of international comparative research does not differ from research undertaken just within one country (Teichler 1996; Goedebuure and Van Vught 1996), some problems are posed in an especially complicated and intractable fashion (Hantrais 2009; Smelser 1976/2013), because of the focus on units that are dissimilar as well as similar (to be comparable). This poses specific challenges to international comparative research. [Continues, please see the article]nonPeerReviewe