\u201cWhat makes an organization unique?\u201d has been a central question for research and practice on competitive advantage. Being unique is associated to the ability to attract and convince customers,
investors, and employees, thereby easing the process of collection of resources needed to operate, and augmenting the value of products, services, and opportunities provided. At the same time, being unique makes it harder for competitors to imitate the organization, and extends the advantage in time. Uniqueness does not come without a less positive side, because it can constrain the organization, which has to maintain continuity with the perceptions of all the different audiences, thereby making radical change harder. The origins of uniqueness are a central theme for other fields of research, unrelated to management. In psychology, uniqueness lays in the underlying, and unobservable structure of personality. In chemistry and physics, uniqueness of elements is attributed to the very specific structure of their inner components. In evolutionary biology, the common thread is to attribute uniqueness to some characteristic that endows an organism, i.e. genes. All these metaphors have been explored in management research. However, one of the most fruitful appears to be the analogy with evolutionary biology, which constitutes the leading theme of the overall Genor research project. This paper provides a literature review of organizational theory from this point of observation. Research in organization theory is characterized by the problem of defining the adequate level of
analysis. Different perspectives and theories adopt different levels of analysis, and multi-level theory and research is rather uncommon. Differently from other areas of scientific inquiry (like for example physics, chemistry, and biology) organization theory has not addressed explicitly the problem of searching for the smallest common unit of analysis. The widespread use of metaphors developed in other scientific domains enriched organization theory with perspectives that explicitly or implicitly affirm the existence of units of analysis beyond the individual. Among them, perspectives related to the biological metaphor play a powerful role. These perspectives adopt evolutionary mechanisms, consider the interplay between time, inertia, and change, and provide analogies to the concepts of genes (or as more broadly defined by Richard Dawkins, memes). The goal of this paper is to look at existing theories that adopt an analogy to genetics as part of a new field of inquiry that we propose to denominate Organizational genetics. After reviewing how existing theories could be related to this field, we develop an initial theoretical framework that will need to be further developed
