22208: Strategy, Organization, and Management Research as Evolutionary Social Science?

What is, and what should be, the role of evolutionary theory in management research? The purpose of this PDW is to explore if and how evolutionary theory can serve as an integrative paradigm for management scholarship. The working hypothesis is that we can achieve a deeper understanding of the (dis)functionality of contemporary organizations by explicitly building theories on an understanding of the evolutionary origins of human behavior in general, and of human organizational capabilities in particular. Management research has historically been divided into macro and micro scholarship, but there is an increasing recognition of the need to bridge these levels of analysis. Evolutionary theory has been and is being used by both macro scholars (e.g., the variation, selection, retention logic from evolutionary economics) and micro scholars (e.g., ideas from evolutionary psychology). The questions that this PDW will explore are if connections between these different types of evolutionary theory can be made, what these connections might look like, and to what degree evolutionary theory offers a paradigm for integrating micro and macro research. The intended outcomes of the PDW are threefold: (1) to offer an interdisciplinary platform for building a community of management scholars interested in evolutionary theory, (2) to start a conversation between macro and micro scholars about how their different types of evolutionary theory may connect, and (3) to articulate what management research as an evolutionary social science could look like if we integrate the various strands of evolutionary theory.