Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations

Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations PDF Author: Joel A.C. Baum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195358910
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
This book presents the latest research and theory about organizational evolutionary change. It brings together the work of organization theorists who have played key roles in challenging the orthodox adaptation views that prevailed until the beginning of the 1980s. Joel A.C. Baum and Jitendra V. Singh emphasize hierarchy of evolutionary processes at the intraorganizational level, the organizational level, the population level, and the community level. Derived from a conference held at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations is organized in a way that gives order and coherence to what has been a diverse and multidisciplinary field.

Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations

Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations PDF Author: Joel A.C. Baum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195358910
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 518

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Book Description
This book presents the latest research and theory about organizational evolutionary change. It brings together the work of organization theorists who have played key roles in challenging the orthodox adaptation views that prevailed until the beginning of the 1980s. Joel A.C. Baum and Jitendra V. Singh emphasize hierarchy of evolutionary processes at the intraorganizational level, the organizational level, the population level, and the community level. Derived from a conference held at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations is organized in a way that gives order and coherence to what has been a diverse and multidisciplinary field.

Evolutionary Processes and Organizational Adaptation

Evolutionary Processes and Organizational Adaptation PDF Author: Daniel A. Levinthal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192634100
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
How do firms adapt? There are two basic starting points from which to answer that question. One is premised on ideas of rational choice and intentionality, while the other is a process of evolutionary dynamics. Both are well-defined and operate as powerful intellectual attractors. Using the ideas of Gregor Mendel as a useful touchstone, this book aims to construct a middle-ground between these two conceptions. The image of the "Mendelian" executive shows how we might effectively balance the ideas of godlike rational design on the one hand and evolutionary dynamics on the other. The perspective developed in this book is anchored on the two key primitives of path-dependence and artificial selection. The intentionality of the Mendelian executive allows for the conscious exploration of opportunities, rather than the happenstance of random variants, yet the constraining forces of path-dependence may lead these moves to adjacent spaces. This perspective also highlights the role of intentionality with respect to the selection and culling of strategic initiatives. The organization operates an “artificial selection” environment, as firms receive profits and losses and, in turn, mediate how these environmental outcomes are projected onto underlying elements and actors within the organization. In this spirit, exploration can be considered not merely as the distance in the underlying behavior from current action, but also as changes in the dimensions of merit by which initiatives are judged. The Mendelian executive is a catalyst and cultivator of promising pathways to unknown futures.

Evolutionary Dynamics

Evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: Martin A. Nowak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674417755
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
At a time of unprecedented expansion in the life sciences, evolution is the one theory that transcends all of biology. Any observation of a living system must ultimately be interpreted in the context of its evolution. Evolutionary change is the consequence of mutation and natural selection, which are two concepts that can be described by mathematical equations. Evolutionary Dynamics is concerned with these equations of life. In this book, Martin A. Nowak draws on the languages of biology and mathematics to outline the mathematical principles according to which life evolves. His work introduces readers to the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems, no matter how complicated they might seem. Evolution has become a mathematical theory, Nowak suggests, and any idea of an evolutionary process or mechanism should be studied in the context of the mathematical equations of evolutionary dynamics. His book presents a range of analytical tools that can be used to this end: fitness landscapes, mutation matrices, genomic sequence space, random drift, quasispecies, replicators, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, games in finite and infinite populations, evolutionary graph theory, games on grids, evolutionary kaleidoscopes, fractals, and spatial chaos. Nowak then shows how evolutionary dynamics applies to critical real-world problems, including the progression of viral diseases such as AIDS, the virulence of infectious agents, the unpredictable mutations that lead to cancer, the evolution of altruism, and even the evolution of human language. His book makes a clear and compelling case for understanding every living system—and everything that arises as a consequence of living systems—in terms of evolutionary dynamics.

The Blackwell Companion to Organizations

The Blackwell Companion to Organizations PDF Author: Joel Baum
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631216957
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 992

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Book Description
Drawing on the research of more than 50 influential international scholars, this extensive interdisciplinary survey consolidates and evaluates what is known and not known about organizations, and critically examines how we learn about and study them. Contributors include 50 influential international scholars. Contributions represent the most important contemporary perspectives on organizations, including networks, ecology and technology. Each topic is covered at three levels of organization: intraorganizational, organizational, and interorganizational. Chapters structured around five common elements for ease of use.

Variations in Organization Science

Variations in Organization Science PDF Author: Donald Thomas Campbell
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761911265
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
If he were an assistant professor today, what work would social science giant Donald T. Campbell be doing in the field of organization science? Joel A. C. Baum and Bill McKelvey explore this question in Variations in Organization Science. This volume reveals and celebrates Campbell's many contributions to the field by presenting new variations that stem directly from his work. Rather than analyzing Campbell's work, chapter authors pursue additional implications and further applications of his perspective to organization science - some of which Campbell himself might have pursued if he were starting out as an assistant professor in 1999.

The Evolution of Organizations

The Evolution of Organizations PDF Author: John Child
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781849801393
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Evolution of Organizations brings together a selection of significant articles by leading academics as to how organizations and their environments evolve over time. They examine the foundation of evolutionary thinking, its application to the evolution of organizational populations and industries, the question of how individual organizations evolve, and the co-evolution of organizations and their environments.

(R)Evolution

(R)Evolution PDF Author: Rob Dekkers
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780387261256
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
(R)Evolution studies the adaptation of industrial organisations to the dynamics of the environment by drawing an analogy with evolutionary biology, by extensively studying literature in management science, and by case studies. These investigations have lead to the insight that companies might evolve slower than generally expected; they doubt the effect of reorganizations, as commonly practiced in industry. Additionally, this work proposes the model for the Innovation Impact Point, the model for the Dynamic Adaptation Capability, the model for Collaboration.

Evolutionary Processes and Organizational Adaptation

Evolutionary Processes and Organizational Adaptation PDF Author: Daniel A. Levinthal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191897375
Category : Management
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Strategists are encouraged to identify sustained competitive advantages. This volume takes a different tact and provides a perspective on how organizations adapt over time to changing circumstances. This process is characterized as not driven by the inspired wisdom of a grand strategist, but by an ecology of initiatives within the organization. A central role of the organization is to mediate between the market forces in which it operates and the culling and amplification of these initiatives within the organization. In this spirit, a useful touchstone is that of Mendel, who sits intermediate between the blind watchmaker of a purely Darwinian process and a "chess master" strategist as suggested by stylized rational choice approaches. The "Mendelian executive" operates with intentionality, but this intentionality is with respect to the design of the experimental process rather than the identification of specific pathways forward. The two core conceptual pillars of the work are that of path-dependence, what are the adjacent "spaces" to which an organization might move, and "artificial selection," how the organization mediates aggregate immediate outcomes and the allocation of resources and rewards to the various initiatives and actors within the organization. Entities that have a sustained lifespan are not static, but engage in processes of renewal, whether cells in the human body or lines of business within a firm. A conceptual framework is provided to illuminate some of the fundamental mechanisms underlying this process.

Evolutionary Dynamics

Evolutionary Dynamics PDF Author: James Patrick Crutchfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195142655
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
The 14 chapters of this volume, which present an overview of new research in evolutionary dynamics, were first presented at a conference held in October 1998 at the Santa Fe Institute. The main divisions of the book are macroevolution; epochal evolution; population genetics, dynamics, and optimization; and evolution of cooperation. Individual topics include spectral landscape theory, external triggers in biological evolution, and evolutionary dynamics of asexual reproduction. Several of the contributors, like the editors, are affiliated with the Sante Fe Institute; others teach or work in physics, genetics, biology, computational neuroscience, and theoretical chemistry at universities and private institutions in the US, UK, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Israel, and Germany. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Evolution of Cooperation

The Evolution of Cooperation PDF Author: Robert Axelrod
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786734884
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A famed political scientist's classic argument for a more cooperative world We assume that, in a world ruled by natural selection, selfishness pays. So why cooperate? In The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod seeks to answer this question. In 1980, he organized the famed Computer Prisoners Dilemma Tournament, which sought to find the optimal strategy for survival in a particular game. Over and over, the simplest strategy, a cooperative program called Tit for Tat, shut out the competition. In other words, cooperation, not unfettered competition, turns out to be our best chance for survival. A vital book for leaders and decision makers, The Evolution of Cooperation reveals how cooperative principles help us think better about everything from military strategy, to political elections, to family dynamics.