Why managers need an evolutionary theory of organizations

Richerson, Peter J.; Collins, Dwight; Genet, R. M.

doi:10.1177/1476127006064069

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Despite this, anthropological studies of organisations remain few, with the exceptions of ethnography (Van Maanen, 1979), ethnoscience (Gregory, 1983), organisational forms (Meyer and Rowan, 1977), cultures (Pettigrew, 1979) and rites and ceremonials (Trice and Beyer, 1984). Our work is also an answer to the call for ‘understanding the tribal roots of our social instincts’ (Richerson et al., 2006: 201).…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 89%

The Fishing President: Ritual in constructing leadership mythology

Kuronen

Virtaharju

2013

Leadership

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We study leadership using anthropological and visual methodological viewpoints, starting from Lévi-Strauss' association of ritual and mythology. We explore the private fishing ritual of the Cold War era President of Finland, Urho Kekkonen and his political elite 'tribe' using visual discourse analysis. We show how the emergent leadership mythology was communicated both within and outside this tribe. The qualitative dataset consists of one primary and two secondary data types: photographs, and correspondence exchanges and media material fragments. We report our analysis through a photo-essay, in which the development of ritual and mythology is presented over time. Our theoretical contributions include showing the association of ritual and myth in the leadership context and how they are intertwined and how they also may separate, as well as the description of a primal leadership archetype, that of the hunter.

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Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 89%

The Fishing President: Ritual in constructing leadership mythology

Kuronen

Virtaharju

2013

Leadership

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“…In that sense the strategic understanding is evolutionary as it addresses the essence for corporate replication and transformation in dynamic contexts (Richerson et al, 2006). Sustainable water management refers to the integrated management and governance of all artificial and natural water cycles under consideration of a long-term protection of water as a habitat or as a central element of habitats and livelihoods (BMBF, 2014).…”

Section: Sustainable Water Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

The lack of strategic sustainability orientation in German water companies

Arnold

2015

Ecological Economics

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“…Perhaps policy makers ought to bear Galen's injunction "first, do no harm" in mind. We think that understanding the processes of cultural evolution promises to help policy makers improve on their poor record of institutional design (Richerson et al 2006).…”

Section: Solving the Equilibrium Selection Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems

Richerson¹,

Henrich²

2012

CDN

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Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity and diversity arises from culturally transmitted ideas, values and skills that underpin the operation of social norms and institutions that structure our social life. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to the role of cultural evolutionary processes in the evolution of social norms and institutions. The most persistent controversy has been over the role of cultural group selection and geneculture coevolution in early human populations during Pleistocene. We argue that cultural group selection and related cultural evolutionary processes had an important role in shaping the innate components of our social psychology. By the Upper Paleolithic humans seem to have lived in societies structured by institutions, as do modern populations living in small-scale societies. The most ambitious attempts to test these ideas have been the use of experimental games in field settings to document human similarities and differences on theoretically interesting dimensions. These studies have documented a huge range of behavior across populations, although no societies so far examined follow the expectations of selfish rationality. These data are at least consistent with operation of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution operating in the deep tribal past and with the contemporary importance of cultural evolution in the evolution of institutions and institutional diversity. The Genetic Evolution Capacities for Cultural Learning The first step in approaching these questions from an evolutionary perspective involves deploying logic of natural selection, aided by formal evolutionary modeling, to hypothesize what kinds of learning strategies or heuristics should individuals-be they toddlers or song birds-use to adapt to uncertain, novel and/or changing environments, including environments involving social interactions (Boyd and Richerson 1985). In such environments, information about the costs and benefits of alternative behaviors is costly, or sometimes impossible to acquire. In such environments social learning strategies, which include heuristics like 'copy the most successful' or 'copy the majority,' can outcompete learning strategies that rely solely on the direct evaluation of perceived costs and benefits (Laland 2004). This approach, however, does not suggest that people don't evaluate costs and benefits directly (of course, they do), but instead it suggests that straight cost-benefit evaluations of alternatives is only one component in a suite of strategies that permit individuals to adapt to diverse, changing, or low-information environments. Evolutionary hypotheses about cultural learning have been subdivided into those that rely on the 'context' in which a representation or cultural variant is expressed (e.g., who expresses it) and those that use the 'content' of trait or representation to determine whether to adopt it (Henrich and McElreath 2003). Context-based learning mechanisms allow learners to use cues to sel...

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Why managers need an evolutionary theory of organizations

Cited by 13 publications

References 13 publications

The Fishing President: Ritual in constructing leadership mythology

The Fishing President: Ritual in constructing leadership mythology

The lack of strategic sustainability orientation in German water companies

Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems

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