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September 2002: A Workshop on Cognitions and Capabilities is taking place at Harvard. Click here for details.
July 2002: Darwinism in Economics: from Analogy to Ontology. Geoffrey Hodgson has written an important paper that addresses the criticisms that have been marshaled against the application of evolutionary explanations in the social sciences. Hodgson highlights that Darwinism includes a broad theoretical framework for the analysis of the evolution of all open, complex systems, and involves a basic philosophical commitment to detailed, cumulative, causal explanations. You can download this new paper here.
May 2002: A workshop on “Empirical research on routines in business and economics: Towards a research program” will be held on the November 3-4 in Odense, Denmark. Click here for a call for papers.
April 2002: The Fourth International Workshop on Institutional Economics
March 2002: A roundtable on “Resources, Routines and Industrial Dynamics in the Experimentally Organized Economy” will be held on the October 24 and 25 in Hirtshals, Denmark. Click here for details. The first English translation of the seventh chapter of Schumpeter’s 1912 classic “Theory of Economic Evolution” will appear in a special issue on Industry and Innovation. Click here for a table of contents.
May 2001: Post-Doc Position
The Evolutionary Economics Unit at the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems in Jena, Germany, seeks to recruit a scientist with a demonstrated interest in evolutionary economics, holding a doctoral degree in economics or related fields for no more than 5 years. Applicants are expected to contribute to the institute's ongoing research (please consult: http://www.mpiew-jena.mpg.de). The contract period is negotiable (1 to 3 years). Remuneration follows the German federal salary schedule (BAT). Applications should be sent to Professor Ulrich Witt, Evolutionary Economics Unit, Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems, Kahlaische Str. 10, D-07745 Jena, Germany
April 2001: A large public conference on the contributions of Nelson & Winter will take place at DRUID in Aalberg, Denmark, June 12-15. The conference home page provides all relevant information. A volume "Evolution of Cultural Entities" edited by Wheeler, Ziman and Boden is in preparation. Click here for a tentative table of contents and e-mail addresses of editors.
March 2001: A conference on Evolutionary Economics is taking place at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, March 30-31. The public is invited. For program and list of participants click here.
February 2001: The abstracts of a new working papers by Howard Aldrich & Martha Argelia Martinez, Johann Peter Murmann, and Richard R. Nelson are posted.
January 2001: The abstract of a new working paper by Bruce Fetter applying the concept of memes to human mortality reduction is now posted.
 | Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process. Cambridge University Press, 2000. For our third original review (published January 9, 2001), Keith Pavitt has taken on the challenging task of evaluating this important new edited book for etss.net. John Ziman (editor) brought together leading scholars on technological change (John Ziman, Eva Jablonka, Joel Mokyr, Richard Nelson, Alan Macfarlane, Sarah Harrison, Gerry Martin, David Turnbull, Paul A. David, W. Bernard Carlson, David Perkins, Walter G. Vincenti, Joan Solomon, Geoffrey Miller, Edward W. Constant II, Rikard Stankiewicz, James Fleck, Gerard Fairclough, Janet Davies Burns) to appraise the usefulness of evolutionary ideas in explaining technical change. You can download the first chapter of the book as a pdf file here. Share your thoughts on the book or the review by posting a message in the discussion forum.
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November 2000: A conference took place in honor of the Richard R. Nelson at Columbia University in New York. Click here for details on the conference and the papers presented. You can read there Sidney Winter's speech "The Evolution of Dick Nelson" and go on a photo tour.
October 2000: Scientific American published in its October 2000 issue an article by Susan Blackmore on "The Power of Memes." Could the major influence in human evolution have been our penchant for mimicking everything from survival skills to gaudy fashions? The author argues provocatively that a talent for handling memes--ideas and practices transmitted through imitation--is what defines our nature. Lee Alan Dugatkin, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, and Henry Plotkin provide counterpoints.
September 2000: Coming soon is a review of Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, edited by John Ziman. Scroll down for more information on the book in the new book section.
August 2000: Evolutionary Theory in Management and Organization Theory at the Beginning of a New Millennium: A Symposium on the State of the Art and Opportunities for Future Research Evolutionary Theory. The symposium, organized by Johann Peter Murmann, will take place on Monday, Aug 7 2000 4:10PM - 6:00PM at Sheraton Centre in Ballroom East, Toronto Canada. The speakers are Howard Aldrich, Dan Levinthal and Sid Winter. Click here for details.
| May 2000: Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition We continue today (May 9, 2000) our book review feature with Charles Tilly's reviews Stephen Sanderson's "Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition." Stephen Sanderson writes a response clarifying his position. Share your thoughts on the book or the reviews by posting a message in the discussion forum. This review will be published in paper form in the Canadian Journal of History. |
May 2000: The abstract of a new working paper by Maurizzio Zollo and Sidney G. Winter is now posted.
April 2000: The abstracts of new working papers by Louis Galambos and Richard Nelson & Bhaven Sampat are now posted.
April 2000: The abstracts of new working papers by Louis Galambos and Richard Nelson & Bhaven Sampat are now posted. Also coming soon... Charles Tilly reviews Stephen Sanderson's "Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition."
February 2000: We are launching our book review feature.
 | Organizations Evolving |
January 2000: Abstracts of important new working papers by Joel Mokyr are now posted.
December 1999: The first book that we will review is Howard Aldrich's new oeuvre "Organizations Evolving." (For a table of contents, scroll down to the new book announcements.) I have asked two very competent scholars to share with us their views on Aldrich's new book. Once we receive their reviews, Howard Aldrich will have the opportunity to respond. The reviews and the potential response will be posted sometime in January and we will then open up a debate on the book in the discussion forum. If you are interested in the world of organizations, you may want to read the book over the break and contribute your views on the book in the discussion forum. Happy Holidays.
November 1999: etss.net is evolving...One of the features that we will offer in the future is reviews of books and articles. We will start with books that are just coming out and later review classics. Check out the abstracts of important new working papers by David Hull and Geoffrey Hodgson.
September 1999: I will be teaching a Ph.D. seminar next April, which I have tentatively titled "Evolutionary Theories of Organization." In preparation for the seminar, I started to look for a place on the web that collects information about Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences. Because I could not find a comprehensive web site, I decided that it would be beneficial to create such a resource in time for my seminar in March 2000. The outline of the web site is now in place, allowing you to imagine what the site can look like when it is done. Much of the "data" still needs to be filled in. I invite you to make suggestions about the design of this site and, above all, to send me information and links that should be part of the web site. My e-mail address is: jpm@nwu.edu. Let's make this a very useful tool for everyone who is interested in evolutionary thought in the social sciences.
| Johann Peter Murmann, September 1999 |
| Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process Read Pavitt's Review |
 | Variations in Organization Science: In Honor of Donald T. Campbell If you are interested in evolutionary theories of organizations, this is a new collection of essays that you want to take a look at. Click on the cover for a table of contents. |
| Organizations Evolving |
 | The Demography of Corporations and Industries by Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan Coming soon: A full review and more of the organizational ecology literature and research (500 pp). The publisher's preview: The Demography of Corporations and Industries is the first book to present the demographic approach to organizational studies in its entirety. It examines the theory, models, methods, and data used in corporate demographic research. Carroll and Hannan explore the processes by which corporate populations change over time, including organizational founding, growth, decline, structural transformation, and mortality. They review and synthesize the major theoretical mechanisms of corporate demography, ranging from aging and size dependence to population segregation and density dependence. The book also explores some selected implications of corporate demography for public policy, including employment and regulation. Click on the title for a table of contents. |
| Sources of Industrial Leadership: Studies of Seven Industries. Edited by David Mowery and Richard R. Nelson This book describes and analyzes how seven major high-tech industries evolved in the USA, Japan, and Western Europe. The industries covered are machine tools, organic chemical products, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, computers, semiconductors, and software. In each of these industries, firms located in one or a very few countries became the clear technological and commercial leaders. In number of cases, the locus of leadership changed, sometimes more than once, over the course of the histories studied. The locus of the book is on the key factors that supported the emergence of national leadership in each industry, and the reasons behind the shifts when they occurred. Special attention is given to the national policies which helped to create, or sustain, industrial leadership. Click on the title for a table of contents. |
| Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process Edited by John Ziman Coming in April 2000. The publisher writes in the preview: Technological artefacts and biological organisms "evolve" by very similar processes of blind variation and selective retention. This analogy is explored systematically, for the first time, by a team of international experts from a number of disciplines - evolutionary biology, history and sociology of science and technology, cognitive and computer science, economics, psychology, education, cultural anthropology and research management. Do technological "memes" play the role of genes? In what sense are novel inventions "blind"? Does the element of design make them "Lamarckian" rather than "Darwinian"? Is the recombination of ideas the essence of technological creativity? Can invention be simulated computationally? What are the entities that actually evolve - artefacts, ideas or organizations? Why are some societies technologically static? How should technological innovation be fostered economically? These are only some of the many fruitful questions stimulated and partially answered by this powerful metaphor. By its practical demonstration of the explanatory potential of "evolutionary reasoning" in a well-defined context, this book is a ground-breaking contribution to every discipline concerned with cultural change. Please click on title for a table of contents. |
Editor
Advisory Board
Howard Aldrich (North Carolina)
Glenn Carroll (UC Berkeley)
Giovanni Dosi (Pisa)
David Hull (Northwestern)
Steven Klepper (Carnegie Mellon)
Richard Nelson (Columbia)
Charles Tilly (Columbia)
Michael Tushman (Harvard)
Walter Vincenti (Stanford)