On the Explanatory Power of Generalized Darwinism: Missing Items on the Research Agenda

Abstract

In a recent article in this journal, Geoffrey Hodgson points out that the notion of ‘evolution’ is widely used in organization science without authors being sufficiently clear on what exactly they mean by this term. In his article, Hodgson cleans up the terminological and conceptual confusion on evolution in organization science and positions so-called ‘generalized Darwinism’ as the only well-elaborated evolutionary framework available in social science. We doubt, however, whether in its present form generalized Darwinism itself constitutes a viable approach. In this article we argue that Hodgson and collaborators so far have failed to show that generalized Darwinism is actually capable of serving as a basis for the construction of evolutionary explanations of social and organizational phenomena. We suggest a few items that should be put on generalized Darwinism’s research agenda in order to develop it towards a viable option.