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Evolutionary dynamics of organizations. Sociology, Computer Science. Abstract This article introduces four basic theories that may serve as building blocks for explaining processes of change in organizations: life cycle, teleology, dialectics, and evolution.
Keywords industrial organization organizational change organizational growth organizational structure organizational sociology industrial management organizational death innovation adoption social change dialectic. Access to Document Together they form a unique fingerprint. Whatever the organizational level that one examines, an evolutionary model consistently focuses on processes of variation, selection, and retention between numerous organizational entities.
Alternative theories of organizational evolution can be distinguished in terms of how traits can be inherited, whether change proceeds gradually and incrementally or rapidly and radically, and whether the unit of analysis focuses on populations of organisms or species.
A Lamarckian view on the acquisition of traits appears more appropriate than strict Darwinism for organization and management applications. As McKelvey points out, strict Darwinists have developed no adequate solutions to operationally identify an organizational generation and an intergenerational transmission vehicle.
Darwinian theorists emphasize a continuous and gradual process of evolution. In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, "as natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modifications; it can act only by short and slow steps.
Whether change proceeds at gradual versus saltational rates is an empirical matter. Thus, the rate of change does not fundamentally alter the theory of evolution -- at least as it has been adopted thus far by organization and management scholars.
Astley and Baum and Singh made this distinction, while Tushman and Romanelli did not. Gould points out that classical Darwinism locates the sorting of evolutionary change at a single level of objects.
This sorting is natural selection operating through the differential births and deaths of organisms, as exemplified in many studies on organizational birth and death rates by population ecologists see reviews in Carroll and Hannan, , and Hannan and Freeman, Gould's punctuated equilibrium model adds a hierarchical dimension to evolutionary theory by distinguishing this sorting the growth or decline of organisms of a given species through differential birth and death rates from speciation the process by which new species or a subgenus is formed.
A Typology of Change Process Theories Life cycle, teleology, dialectical, and evolutionary theories provide four internally consistent accounts of change processes in organizational entities. Where and when do these theories apply to explain development in organizational entities? To address this question it is useful to emphasize four distinguishing characteristics in the preceding discussion of the four theories.
Each theory: 1 views process in terms of a different cycle of change events, 2 which is governed by a different "motor" or generating mechanism that 3 operates on a different unit of analysis and 4 represents a different mode of change. Figure 1 provides a metatheoretical scheme for illustrating and distinguishing the four ideal-type theories in terms of these four characteristics.
We will now discuss these distinguishing characteristics. An institutional, natural, or logical program prescribes the specific contents of these stages. This sequence emerges through the purposeful social construction among individuals within the entity.
Confrontation and conflict between opposing entities generate this dialectical cycle. Competition for scarce environmental resources between entities inhabiting a population generates this evolutionary cycle. Figure 1 shows two analytical dimensions that are useful for classifying these developmental progressions in the four ideal-type process theories: the unit and mode of change.
Unit of Change Change and developmental processes go on at many organizational levels, including the individual, group, organization, population, and even larger communities of organizations.
This nesting of entities into larger organizational entities creates a hierarchical system of levels. This classification highlights two different angles for studying change at any given organizational level: 1 the internal development of a single organizational entity by examining its historical processes of change, adaptation, and replication, and 2 the relationships between numerous entities to understand ecological processes of competition, cooperation, conflict and other forms of interaction.
A similar classification is used by Baum and Singh in their dual hierarchy framework. It distinguishes between interactions among organizational entities in an ecological hierarchy, and adaptation and replication processes within the genealogical history of an entity. Evolutionary and dialectical theories operate on multiple entities. Evolutionary forces are defined in terms of their impacts on populations and have no meaning at the level of the individual entity. Dialectical theories require at least two entities to fill the roles of thesis and antithesis.
Even if we conceptualize the dialectic as occurring within a single person or organization, as does Riegel's dialectical theory of child development, the motor focuses on the interaction between two entities; the child and its environment. The explanatory model is thus taken down a level and entities are distinguished within the child's mind and the world.
Notwithstanding level, the explanation must distinguish at least two and in Riegel's case four entities that engage in the dialectic. Conversely, life cycle and teleological theories operate on a single entity. Life cycle theory explains development as a function of potentials immanent within the entity. While environment and other entities may shape how this immanence manifests itself, they are strictly secondary. The real push to development comes from within the single, whole developing entity.
Teleological theories, too, require only a single entity's goals to explain development. A teleological theory can operate among many members of an organization when there is sufficient consensus among the members to permit them to act as a single organizational entity. Thus, as long as the entity undergoing change has a discrete identity, we can decompose the entity within a nested organizational hierarchy to examine its members or aggregate the entity into its larger system without losing any of the theory's explanatory power.
However, if we decide to examine processes of change between several distinct organizational entities, we move to either a dialectical or evolutionary theory, because we must specify laws, rules, or processes by which the entities interact. Mode of Change We can also distinguish the four motors in terms of whether the sequence of change events is prescribed a-priori by either deterministic or probabilistic laws, or whether the progression is constructed and emerges as the change process unfolds.
A prescribed mode of change channels the development of entities in a pre-specified direction, typically of maintaining and incrementally adapting their forms in a stable, predictable way.
A constructive mode of change generates unprecedented, novel forms that in retrospect are often discontinuous and unpredictable departures from the past. A prescribed mode evokes a sequence of change events in accord with a pre-established program or action routine. A constructive mode, on the other hand, produces new action routines that may or may not create an original re formulation of the entity. Life cycle and evolutionary theories operate in a prescribed modality, while teleological and dialectical theories operate in the constructive modality.
A prescribed mode tends to create what Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch termed first order change, change within an existing framework that produces variations on a theme. The processes that produce these variations are prescribed and predictable because they are patterned on the previous state. Over the longer term, small changes may cumulate to produce a larger change in degree or quality of the entity.
From his biological frame of reference DeRosnay views prescribed motors as concerned with ontogenesis, involving the reproduction of entities similar to the original line. Life cycle and evolutionary theories incorporate a prescribed mode of change.
During the life cycle the immanent form realizes itself by steps, and while some steps may seem like a radical morphogenic change, there is an underlying continuity due to the immanent form, logic, program, or code that drives development. Due to its immanent motor very seldom do frame-breaking changes or mutations arise in life cycle models.
Evolutionary accounts rely on the statistical cumulation of small individual events to gradually change the nature of the larger population. Although we tend to think of mutations as sudden, drammatic changes, in actuality the evolutionary system operates according to prescribed rules which determine whether the mutation "takes" and change occurs.
The apparent exception to this statement, punctuated equilibrium, actually conforms to it on closer examination. In the punctuated equilibrium model of biological evolution posited by Gould and Eldridge , species emergence at the micro level is sudden, but the diffusion of species that ultimately alters the characteristics of populations occurs through many individual events spread over quite long periods of time on the order of millions of years Gould, A constructive mode tends to generate what Watzlawick, et al termed second- order change, that is a break with the past basic assumptions or framework.
The process is emergent as new goals are enacted. It can produce highly novel features; the outcome is unpredictable because it is discontinuous with the past. Those undergoing such changes may experience a high degree of uncertainty and a need to make sense of the changes. Teleological and dialectical motors incorporate a constructive mode of development. By their very nature, teleological processes seek to diverge from the current order: a process that has as its goal to preserve the status quo would be a theory of statics, not dynamics.
Because goals can be changed at the will of the entity and because the prerequisites may be attained in many ways, teleological theories project a situation that is in principle unpredictable, may result in discontinuity, and may break current frames Von Wright, As a result, a teleological motor projects fundamental and novel changes in the entity.
However, there is an apparent problem: many theories in the literature which draw on teleology also explicate gradual processes by which the goals are realized. For example, Chakravarthy and Lorange , describe corporate strategic planning as a stage-wise, incremental process. Such gradual accounts of goal implementation actually combine two of the ideal types, teleological theory and life cycle theory, to form a composite model. Section III will discuss a number of such composites.
In its pure form, however, the twin features of intentionality and the ability to change goals at will make teleological theories inherently emergent and creative. Dialectical theory also incorporates a constructive mode of change. The sequence by which the thesis and antithesis confront and engage each other in a conflict struggle is highly uncertain; events leading to confrontation of opposites and resolutions may occur intermittently over the course of development. The result is a synthesis that breaks the current frame and represents second-order change.
It produces a revolutionary change resulting in a new entity that is an original rather than the reproduction of some prior state or entity. Summary The two dimensions of unit and mode of change classify the four theories in terms of their action and process. They differ from other dimensions often used to classify theories of organizational change, such as incremental versus radical change e. These dimensions classify organizational changes by their consequences or outcomes, rather than by their starting or process conditions.
One advantage of the typology is that it is possible to identify the motor s of a change process before it has concluded. Antecedent and outcome dimensions of change processes may be related in an actuarial or statistical sense, but not in a causal manner.
Statistically we should expect the vast majority of incremental, continuous and competence-enhancing changes to follow the operations of a prescribed mode, just as radical, discontinuous, and competence-destroying changes should follow from a constructive mode. These temporal relationships may not be causal.
For example, the infrequent statistical occurrence of a discontinuous and radical mutation may be caused by a glitch in the operation of a prescribed life cycle motor of change. So also, the scale-up of a teleological motor designed to create a fundamental strategic reorientation of a company may fizzle, resulting only in incremental change. Situating the four ideal motors of change and development on the two dimensions accentuates their differences and enables us to describe them in their pure forms.
Each of the four motors depends on a different set of conditions, depicted in Table 2. Determining whether these conditions are satisfied enables researchers to make an initial judgment concerning whether a given type of motor explains development in a particular situation.
However, as our examples illustrate, theories of organizational change and development seldom use the ideal types in their pure forms. To understand how the ideal types figure in theoretical "practice" and to appreciate their utility, we will now consider specific theories which focus on particular types of organizational changes. For the sake of clarity, we will refer to the ideal type theories as motors of change and reserve the term theory for the complex, specific theories which have been developed by various researchers.
This is so for two reasons. First, because the organizational context of development and change extends over space and time in any specific case, it is possible for more than one motor to come into play.
Organizational development and change are influenced by diverse units and actors, both inside and outside the organization. Their spacial dispersion means that different influences may be acting simultaneously on different parts of the organization, each imparting its own particular momentum to the developmental process. In some cases more than one change motor may influence development and change.
Development and change also take time to occur. As time passes, there is opportunity for different motors to come into play, especially given the dispersion of influences. The resulting observed process is multi-layered and complex. Trying to account for this with a single motor runs the risk of oversimplification and selective attention to one aspect of the change process at the expense of others. A study of the development of a new organizational entity engaged in the development of a biomedical innovation, the cochlear implant, by Van de Ven and Garud illustrates this.
This innovation was shaped by change processes occurring on numerous fronts. In a different sphere, the action of top managers in purposefully selecting and funding it was also consistent with a teleological model, but the decision premises and timing of managerial interventions moved at a different pace than efforts of the development team.
At a certain point in its development, the product had to achieve FDA approval, which required a sequence of proposals, clinical trials, and regulatory reviews and approvals.
A fourth influence operated at the larger field of researchers and clinicians concerned with hearing health: the firm's pioneering implant design was initially supported by the field, but evidence mounted which led most researchers and clinicians to switch allegiance to a competing firm's design.
The complex interplay of these different motors, which operated in different times and places, created a complicated developmental sequence that was difficult to understand until these diverse influences were sorted out.
A second reason for the complexity of specific organizational change and development theories is the inherent incompleteness of any single motor. Each motor pictured in Figure 1 has one or more components whose values are determined exogenously to the model. For example, in the evolutionary model variations are assumed to arise randomly, but the process that gives rise to variation remains unspecified.
In the dialectical model, the origin of the antithesis is obscure, as is the source of dissatisfaction in the teleological model, and the processes which trigger startup and termination in the life cycle model.
Other motors can be used to account for the origin of these events. For instance, the selection process in the evolutionary model can be used to account for termination in the life cycle, the implementation step in the teleological cycle can trigger the startup event in the life cycle and the antithesis in the dialectic.
The synthesis in the dialectic could be the source of variation in the evolutionary cycle. There are many other possible interrelations.
In short, events from other models are useful to remedy the incompleteness of any single model of change. We will argue that most specific theories of organizational development and change are actually composites of two or more ideal type motors. This decomposition of complex theories into simpler ones has several precedents. In cognitive science Newell , and Simon , among others, have argued that complex behavior can be generated by the interplay of a few simple motors.
Common to these approaches is the identification of simple motors whose interplay creates a complex phenomenon. An Array of Composite Theories of Development and Change Each ideal type theory describes a generative mechanism or motor of change. Combinations of these motors create, in effect, hybrid change theories. The simplest form of combination is to determine which of the generating mechanisms underlying the four ideal types are evident or in operation in a given applied theory of organizational change in the literature.
By specifying the presence operation or absences non operation of the four motors in a given situation, an array of sixteen logically-possible explanations of organizational change and development become apparent. This array, shown in Table 3, is analogous to examining the simple main and interaction effects of each of the four motors on alternative applied theories in the management literature. These "single-motor theories" apply to cases when only one of the four change motors is in operation.
The next twelve alternatives represent interaction effects of the interdependent operation of two or more of the four generative mechanisms. Alternatives 5 through 10 are called "dual-motor theories" because they represent cases when only two of the four change motors are in operation in a given organizational change process.
Alternative 15 is a "quad-motor theory," which represents the most complex situation when all of the four generating mechanisms operate interdependently in a given situation. Finally, alternative 16 represents the null set, when no motor is operating.
The left column of Table 3 lists exemplary theories for some of the sixteen logically- possible conditions in which an organizational change or developmental process may unfold.
The rows with a "? Admittedly, the authors of these exemplary theories or models may not agree with our classification, since they did not have our framework in mind when they developed their theories.
However, we contend that the framework provides a useful new way to understand and discriminate between alternative theories of organizational change and development in the literature.
Specifically, we propose that what distinguishes these alternative theories is their incorporation of different combinations of the four motors of change. Space limitations prevent us from providing a systematic discussion of theories representing each of the sixteen logically-possible combinations of the four motors of change.
Instead we will present several examples of how complex theories can be constructed from the interplay of a few simple motors of change. Row 5. Interaction of Life Cycle and Teleological Motors. Clark , building on the work of Utterback and Abernathy , developed a theory of the gradual evolution of technologies.
Abernathy and Utterback had proposed that the evolution of technological production proceeded from an early, "fluid" state to one that is highly "specific" and rigid. Product innovations predominate early in this evolution, but once the nature of the product begins to be determined, process innovations increase and come to dominate until rigidity extinguishes innovation. The result is increasing rigidity through the life of the product.
To explain how changes in technologies come about, Clark discussed the interaction between designers and customers, which establish functional prerequisites for the product. This teleological process is in interplay with another life-cycle motor, the technical design hierarchy. Clark ; p. These precedents create constraints that give rise to further search for alternative designs Once a certain technical path is taken it forecloses other paths and opens up a hierarchy of sub-problems.
Interaction between designers and customers influences progression through a hierarchy; the natural direction of movement is down the hierarchy until the technical agenda is fulfilled, but customer demands may encourage designers to move back up the hierarchy and pursue other paths, or to jump to a different aspect of the design problem altogether. Hence, Clark's theory provides for the interplay of teleological and life cycle motors nested within the overall life cycle progression from product to process emphases.
Row 9. Interaction of Life Cycle and Dialectical Motors. In one of the earliest models of organizational development, Greiner proposed five stages to the life cycle of organizational growth through: creativity, direction, delegation, coordination, and collaboration. Each of these stages culminates in a different dialectical crisis of leadership, autonomy, control, red tape, and?
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