This article considers the causal connection between adaptability and survival in populations of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs). Some literatures have downplayed adaptability by focusing on statics and equilibria (parts of mainstream economics). Others have argued that it is very difficult to make individual firms more adaptable and the focus should be on selection forces in the population as a whole (early organizational ecology). By contrast, writers on strategy devote much attention to improvements in adaptability. Here we outline an approach to the measure of adaptability that focuses on organizational dispositions and routines, and is usable within large samples of firms. This approach was field tested on 909 firms in 2008 in the East of England. A follow-up survey during the severe recession and shake-out in 2009 provided an opportunity to assess the relationship between adaptability and survival. The results were then replicated and interpreted using a computer simulation. While preliminary, our overall findings suggest that adaptability can have a small but important effect in some circumstances. But our evidence is also consistent with a decline in adaptability in individual firms through time, and the strong overall effect of selection forces. Our interpretative methodology may signpost a route toward the reconciliation of 'selectionist' and 'adaptationist' views in the literature.

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 replicator-interactor distinction raised in modern philosophy of biology but overlooked for discussion by Reydon and Scholz provides a way forward. It is possible to conceptualize evolving Darwinian populations providing that the inheritance mechanism is appropriately specified. By this approach, adaptation and selection are no longer dichotomized, and the evolutionary significance of knowledge transmission is highlighted.

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractThe intellectual histories of economics and evolutionary biology are closely intertwined because both subjects deal with living, complex, evolving systems. Because the subject matter is similar, contemporary evolutionary thought has much to offer to economics. In recent decades theoretical biology has progressed faster than economics in understanding phenomena like hierarchical processes, cooperative behavior, and selection processes in evolutionary change. This paper discusses three very old "cosmologies" in Western thought, how these play out in economic theory, and how evolutionary biology can help evaluate their validity and policy relevance. These cosmologies, as manifested in economic theory are, (1) rational economic man, (2) the invisible hand of the market, and (3) the existence of a general competitive equilibrium. It is argued below that current breakthroughs in evolutionary biology and neuroscience can help economics go beyond these simple cosmologies.

In an earlier article published in this journal I challenge Reydon and Scholz's (2009) claim that Organizational Ecology is a non-Darwinian program. In this reply to Reydon and Scholz's subsequent response, I clarify the difference between our two approaches denoted by an emphasis here on the careful application of core Darwinian principles and an insistence by Reydon and Scholz on direct biological analogies. On a substantive issue, they identify as being the principal problem for Organizational Ecology, namely, the inability to identify replicators and interactors "of the right sort" in the business domain; this is also shown to be easily addressed with reference to empirical studies of business populations.