The evolutionary approach has been very attractive since Darwin’s work, and not only in natural science. Nelson and Winter (1962) endeavored to explain an economic change by means of an evolutionary object. This has influenced management science and many scholars attempt to seek the explanation for changing organisational practice from the perspective of selection and adaptation phenomena. Contemporarily, research on evolutionary change in an organisation and of organisations is conducted in many universities. Theories and studies in this field provide new perspectives on understanding and explaining the evolutionary change as a process and practice.
It is envisaged that the evolutionary approach constitutes the extension or even the complement of the behavioral approach in management. However, there are many ambiguities and inconsistencies in perceiving organisations and management from the behavioural lens; recently, scholars have increasingly focused their attention on the practice of strategising with an emphasis on micro-level social activities and combining micro and macro levels of analysis. It seems that linking the behavioural approach and evolutionary one in the context of micro-foundations might provide an opportunity to better understand and explore phenomena associated with one another, although occurring at different epistemological levels.
The objective of this special issue is to bring together the state of the art of the evolutionary approach and behavioural research and to call for exemplary contributions that extend and bridge the existing streams of research on organisational evolution and behavioural strategies. We see potential in recent research on micro-foundations, the behavioural approach and evolutionary perspectives to contribute to an enriched understanding of evolutionary change processes and practices. We are open to a wide range of propositions within the evolutionary and behavioural approach in economics and management. In particular, we invite research that enhances theories on management through the interchange of ideas across different perspectives.
We invite theoretical and empirical papers using wide-range approaches. Research submitted to the issue should explicitly apply evolutionary thinking as a generative lens to theorise about economics and management issues. Other existing theoretical perspectives in strategising, micro-foundations and behavioural strategies research could be linked to theorise whether, how and why behaviours matter in the evolutionary process; under what circumstances they are likely to be beneficial in terms of organisational survival; how their effects succeed and what enabling and constraining mechanisms are or could be at work in the evolutionary process. As such, it is also not necessary for research submitted to consider only positive outcomes.
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Evolutionary thoughts as well as behavioural approaches in economics and management - mainstream, novelties and comparison, especially:
- Evolution of organisations and industries
- Evolution objectives (i.e. organisational routines)
- Evolutionary agents (environment and managers)
- Evolutionary processes (variation, selection, retention)
- Selection's objectives
- Levels, determinants and agents
- Evolutionary levels of analysis
- Co-evolution phenomenon
- Mechanisms of adaptation
- Behavioral determinants of organisational evolution
- Aspects of mindfulness, mental processes, attention, heuristics, habits, bounded rationality, etc., as well as mutual hallmarks and differences between the behavioural approach and evolutionary perspective
- Theorising and examining phenomena at different levels of analysis, including methodological approaches, methods and techniques in the field of evolutionary perspective and behavioral approach in terms of, for example, micro-foundations concepta, multi-level analysis, and others.
Important Dates
Submission of manuscripts: 30 November, 2016
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