Is organizational evolution Darwinian and/or Lamarckian?

Abstract

Purpose

Recently, some biologists have argued that the time has come to replace separation between Lamarckism and Darwinism with their connection. The aim of this paper is to understand whether this paradigm shift in the interpretation of biological evolution offers useful insights for dealing with the unresolved issue of how industries and their organizational populations evolve.

Design/methodology/approach

Lamarckism and Darwinism are two approaches that have contrasted or interwoven with each other in the study of biological evolution, just as they have in the study of organizational evolution. This paper provides a critical analysis of the long history of the debate through to the recent, revolutionary discoveries in evolutionary microbiology obtained in the wake of the genomic revolution.

Findings

From this new research frontier emerge three important findings: adaptive variations are no longer an anomaly that is peculiar to human organizations, but rather correspond to a widely observed phenomenon in the biological world; the same can be said for the process of horizontal replication; Lamarckism and Darwinism are not two mutually exclusive interpretations of evolution but two dimensions of evolution that coexist in various ways. Lamarckian dimension of evolution and the Darwinian one, handled in the light of these results, may help to understand the evolutionary logic that underpins specific stages of the history of industries.

Originality/value

The paper presents a new way of looking at industries and their firms from an evolutionary perspective.

Citation

Grandinetti, R. (2018), "Is organizational evolution Darwinian and/or Lamarckian?", International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Vol. 26 No. 5, pp. 858-874. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOA-03-2018-1367