On the Explanatory Power of Generalized Darwinism: Missing Items on the Research Agenda

Abstract

In a recent article in this journal, Geoffrey Hodgson points out that the notion of 'evolution' is widely used in organization science without authors being sufficiently clear on what exactly they mean by this term. In his article, Hodgson cleans up the terminological and conceptual confusion on evolution in organization science and positions so-called 'generalized Darwinism' as the only well-elaborated evolutionary framework available in social science. We doubt, however, whether in its present form generalized Darwinism itself constitutes a viable approach. In this article we argue that Hodgson and collaborators so far have failed to show that generalized Darwinism is actually capable of serving as a basis for the construction of evolutionary explanations of social and organizational phenomena. We suggest a few items that should be put on generalized Darwinism's research agenda in order to develop it towards a viable option.

The Claims of Generalized Darwinism

“…These then become a ready-made hook on which to hang a discussion without it becoming encumbered by references to the original literature that seemingly developed the GD framework, or indeed to the extensive literature on associated topics such as evolutionary economics, organismic perspectives and models of organization, or organismic and evolutionist-type social theories more generally. Both papers have in fact already attracted what I consider to be useful critical commentaries (Scholz and Reydon 2013;Reydon and Scholz 2014), but that criticism was, or so I shall argue, rather too narrow. The principal business of this paper is therefore to add to it and then to offer an assessment of where the GD framework does, and does not, work.…”

“…Marcus Scholz and Thomas Reydon (2013) supply an insightful critique of Hodgson's (2013a) paper. They press two principal criticisms against it.…”

“…For instance, Scholz and Reydon (2013) ask what it is that GD seeks to explain. But their question ought really to prompt another: what is the logical and scientific status of GD in comparison to Darwin's own theory?…”

“…That is, a dispute over just how much a theory must resemble Darwin's own before it may legitimately be called 'Darwinian'. But if this is a fair characterisation of Hodgson's response to Scholz and Reydon (2013) then their exchange requires a denouement. For an underlying question remains: what is it that GD 'generalizes', or more specifically, what is the scientific status of its purported generalizations in comparison to Darwin's own theory of natural selection?…”

“…Equally, for Scholz and Reydon (2013), a properly Darwinian process of population-level selection requires a stable and buffered reproductive community with ancestor-descendent and mating relations between its members. Organizations, they claim, do not meet these criteria.…”