Cultural Evolution Theory and Organizations

Abstract

Fully explaining organizational phenomena requires exploring not only “how” a phenomenon works – i.e., the details of its internal structure and mechanisms – but also “why” the phenomenon is present in the first place – i.e., explaining its origins and the ultimate reasons for its existence. The latter is particularly important for central questions in organizational research such as the nature of organizations, the evolution of organizational culture, or the origin of organizational capabilities. In this article, we propose that cultural evolution theory (CET) can be usefully applied to organizational scholarship to pursue such “origin” questions. CET has adapted ideas and methods from evolutionary biology to successfully explain the evolution of culture in human societies, exploring the origins of various social phenomena such as religion, technological progress, large-scale cooperation, and cross-cultural psychological variation. We elaborate how CET can be also applied to understand the evolution and origin of important organizational phenomena. We discuss how CET provides ultimate explanations using micro-evolutionary formal models and deploying macro-evolutionary tools for empirical analysis. We provide a detailed application of these ideas to explain the origin of productive organizations (e.g., firms, partnerships, guilds). We also propose several avenues for future research; in particular, we explore how CET can serve as an overarching theoretical framework that helps integrate the myriad of theories that explain how organizations operate and evolve.

Organisational Culture and Business Performance in Harmony Ventures and Supplies Limited, Ilorin, Nigeria

“…However, information in this context comprises notions like ideas, knowledge, values, preferences, beliefs, skills, attitudes, and other socially transmittable mannerisms. This information is often in the form of mental conditions, but can equally be represented in shared notions of norms, stories, routines, technologies as well as in physical media, such as texts, blueprints, and artefacts (Brahm & Poblete, 2022).…”

Organizational Culture, Adaptation, and Performance

“…In this paper, we use a formal model drawn from cultural evolution theory (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Boyd and Richerson 1985Brahm and Poblete 2022) to study how organizational culture affects a relatively understudied mechanism, namely, an organization's capacity to adapt to environmental changes. Existing work in organizational adaptation (see the reviews by Park 2018, Sarta et al 2021) and in organizational culture (Sorensen 2002, Van den Steen 2010b, Hermalin 2012, Corritore et al 2020 tends to emphasize the limitations that organizational culture imposes on organizations' ability to adapt.…”

Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss

“…Furthermore, cultural specialization could potentially benefit the fitness of the entire population, e.g. by increasing its overall productivity and by allowing for more effective social learning [ 26 , 27 ]. However, specialization might be a double-edged sword in cultural accumulation, since cultural knowledge that is known by only a small subset of a population could be more likely to be lost, particularly during periods of demographic change [ 14 ].…”