Summary
Contents
Subject index
`Rodolphe Durand has a compelling message for the growing community of evolutionary researchers in organization studies. Evolutionary researchers need to attend more carefully to historical and contemporary debates in the biological sciences if they are to avoid false tracks and simplisitic analogies. Durand offers here the foundations of a distinctive and authentic evolutionary theory that takes organizations seriously for what they are' - Richard Whittington, Oxford University `This book fills an important gap in the study of organizations and strategy from an evolutionary perspective. It offers a synthetic approach to evolutionary analysis with grounded empirical examples that graduate students and seasoned scholars alike will find immensely useful. Durand's OES model, rooted in a critical examination of philosophical and scientific writings on evolution, is particularly promising and provides a valuable guidepost for future research on organizations and strategic management' - Michael Lounsbury, University of Alberta How is economic evolutionary theory, in which organisations evolve according to environmental selection, reconciled with evidence of strategic management? This book is the first of its kind to propose a solution to this theoretical puzzle and engage readers in a balanced understanding of organizational evolution. Rodolphe Durand embarks upon a fresh assessment of the literature. His discoveries provide the foundation for a new theory of organizational selection and an organizational evolution and strategy model that reconciles economic evolution with strategic intentionality. Chapters include an examination of the work by Lamarck, Darwin and Spencer; a constructive appraisal of evolutionary theory applied to organisations and a summary of how the organizational evolution and strategy model will affect future theory and research. - An associated web site with further information can be found at: http://studies.hec.fr/web/durand
Building the Checklist Appraisal Grid for Evolutionary Models
Previously, we emphasized several predicaments of the research on organizational evolution and strategic management (definitional, theoretical, methodological, and conceptual). Organizational evolution is confronted with time issues, level-of-analysis problems, the thorny conceptualization of selection, the cause-and-consequence positioning dilemma, and questions about the finality of organizational evolution. Strategy and strategic management intersect with organizational evolution at these same problematic places.
This second part of the book offers a detour from direct responses to these questions and problems. We submit that the study of the origins of the evolutionary paradigm may prove useful and enriching, and so we invite the reader to take a closer look at how the ideas of evolution emerged and ...
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