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Marx is widely regarded today as an “evolutionary” economist. However, what is clear from a close examination of the writings of both Marx and Engels is that they did not actually take Darwin′s theory of natural selection on board. Consequently, if their theory of socio‐economic change is evolutionary, it is not so in a Darwinian sense. Considers the different sense in which the economics of Marx can be regarded as “evolutionary” and the distance between Darwinian and Marxian conceptions of natural or social change.

This essay introduces the first translation of Schumpeter’s article Entrepreneur, originally published in 1928. We describe the background of Entrepreneur and use new archival sources to situate the article in time. Entrepreneur marks a transition of Schumpeter’s conception of entrepreneurship that took place between 1911 and 1926. Entrepreneur also contains Schumpeter’s most profound vision on economic selection, a vision that Schumpeter never elaborated further. We consider the most important implications of the new material in Entrepreneur and the reasons for the apparent shift in Schumpeter’s thought.

This paper reviews the latest learning and development books across the globe and pinpoints practical implications.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Driven to Lead Good, Bad and Misguided Leadership is the author's effort to create a unified and accurate model of human behavior and leadership. Paul Lawrence has spent a lifetime researching and writing across the social science fields while teaching at Harvard Business School. In his previous book, Driven, he introduced the concept of four drives that explain human behavior. This book applies that concept to the practice of leadership. Dr Lawrence calls his theory The Renewed Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior and Leadership, finding deep insights from Charles Darwin's second book, The Descent of Man. In 300 pages, this book shows how disciplines from cultural anthropology and psychology to biology and economics can come together to explain human evolution, the current state of the world, and the way forward.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

Evolution has long been a biological process “borrowed” by management sciences to define structural and procedural development in organizations. The theory of Darwinian Evolution in biology has existed for a long time and still (with modification) remains the main theory in life sciences. However in biotechnology new concepts have risen. In parallel, organization sciences have been evolving the concept of evolution on different levels of the organization, discussing the evolution of organization during their life cycle, the evolution of populations of organizations, sectors, etc. Directed evolution in biology creates new organisms that can produce molecules with attributes better fitting industrial use, from naturally occurring organisms, allowing new organisms to function in non‐biological environments and perform processes they never needed to perform in a natural environment. We will show that by translating the concept from biology into organization sciences, we can develop the techniques for the evolution of new organizational structures and fitting routines, that would fit new emerging environments, where we seek the best adapted routines and structures for performance. We will adopt the concept of directly evolving a structure fitting for pre‐designed purposes by using bio‐technology methods, and will try and bridge the gap in organization sciences between the current development of the evolutionary theory and the advance made in biology. At the end discusses opportunities for research (the European Framework Program, national programs), together with a proposed general plan of action. The theory and the techniques descried can lead to further research and active experimentation.

During the great post–World War II economic expansion, modernization theorists held that the new American capitalism balanced mass production and mass consumption, meshed profitability with labor's interests, and ended class conflict. They thought that Keynesian policies insured a near full-employment, low-inflation, continuous growth economy. They viewed the United States as the “new lead society,” eliminating industrial capitalism's backward features and progressing toward modernity's penultimate “postindustrial” stage.⁷ Many Americans believed that the ideal of “consumer freedom,” forged early in the century, had been widely realized and epitomized American democracy's superiority to communism.⁸ However, critics held that the new capitalism did not solve all of classical capitalism's problems (e.g., poverty) and that much increased consumption generated new types of cultural and political problems. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that mainstream economists assumed that human nature dictates an unlimited “urgency of wants,” naturalizing ever increasing production and consumption and precluding the distinction of goods required to meet basic needs from those that stoke wasteful, destructive appetites. In his view, mainstream economists’ individualistic, acquisitive presuppositions crown consumers sovereign and obscure cultural forces, especially advertising, that generate and channel desire and elevate possessions and consumption into the prime measures of self-worth. Galbraith held that production's “paramount position” and related “imperatives of consumer demand” create dependence on economic growth and generate new imbalances and insecurities.⁹ Harsher critics held that the consumer culture blinded middle-class Americans to injustice, despotic bureaucracy, and drudge work (e.g., Mills, 1961; Marcuse, 1964). But even these radical critics implied that postwar capitalism unlocked the secret of sustained economic growth.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Examines the product life cycle (PLC) concept as presented in much of the marketing literature, and the implications of PLC‐based strategic action for marketing practitioners. A range of problems is identified with the PLC, and an evolutionary perspective for product management decisions is considered. Concludes that an evolutionary perspective is more appropriate than PLC‐based approaches, and proposes an evolutionary model known as “Lamarckism”, which is better able to account for the realities of product evolution than the Darwinian model.

What has been called “the McDonaldization of universities” (another name for top-down and strong corporate managerialism) has gained momentum as a model for governing and managing universities. This trend exacerbates the traditional tension between academic freedom and managerial control – a major challenge for the administration of academic institutions. The ideas of Charles Darwin represent an opportunity for overcoming such a challenge. However, traditional managerial models show inadequate, pre-Darwinian assumptions for devising organizational designs. This paper aims to show not only the opportunities but also the challenges of embracing a Darwinian paradigm for designing social systems. The case of managerialism in universities is an illustrative example. The paper proposes evolutionary guidelines for designing universities capable of maintaining managerial control while warranting academic freedom.

The paper proposes to understand the tension between academic freedom and managerial control in universities as the same tension between freedom and control that Karl Popper identified as successfully handled by evolutionary processes. The paper uses Darwinian theory, understood as a broader theory for complex systems, as a heuristic for designing social systems – universities in this case – able to adapt to changing environmental conditions while handling equilibrium between freedom and control. The methodology articulates the Popperian model of knowledge with the Darwinian scheme proposed by David Ellerman known as “parallel experimentation” for suggesting organizational forms in which university administrators and faculty can interact for generating free innovations in pseudo-controlled organizational arrangements.

A salient characteristic of strong managerialism is its pre-Darwinian understanding of survival and adaptation; such an approach shows important flaws that can lead universities to unfit designs that changing environments can select for elimination. As an alternative, the philosophy behind the ideas of Charles Darwin provides guidelines for designing innovative and adaptive social systems. Evolutionary principles challenge basic tenets of strong managerialism as Darwinian designs discard the possibility of seeing managers as knowledgeable designers that allegedly can avoid mistakes by allocating resources to “one-best” solutions through ex ante exhaustive, top-down control. Instead, a Darwinian model requires considering survival as a matter of adaptability through continuous experimentation of blind trials controlled by ex post selection. The key is to organize universities as experimenting systems that try new and different things all the time and that learn and improve by making mistakes, as an adaptive system.

Governing and managing universities require to acknowledge the uniqueness of academic institutions and demand to look for appropriate forms of organization. The proposal of this paper opens possibilities for exploring and implementing action-research initiatives and practical solutions for universities. Studies in management and administration of higher-education institutions must take into account the characteristics of this type of organizations and should consider wider spectrums of possibilities beyond the core ideas of managerialism.

University managers face a special challenge for achieving equilibrium between managerial control and academic freedom. Darwinian models of management invite to reconsider several management creeds, for instance, that “errors are bad things” – instead of innovation triggers and learning opportunities or that “one solution must fit all” – instead of considering bottom-up, different and adaptive solutions triggered by local academic units, each facing different environments.

Currently, there is no clear picture for governing universities. This paper introduces principles and guidelines for facing the current challenge that strong managerialism represents if universities are expected to maintain academic freedom and also survive in volatile environments.

The paper advocates a Darwinian explanation of the process of firm transformation. Existing but generally opposing views related to the selection‐adaptation debates are united to consider the dialogic nature of both approaches. It is argued that a Darwinian approach, as opposed to a neo‐Darwinian or Lamarckian approach, provides the means to scale the sides of a debate that has for too long divided scholars interested in firm and industry transformation.

The paper addresses three specific issues to develop its Darwinian argument. First, the various works of Geoff Hodgson that have for many years advanced Darwin's evolutionary ideas are used to argue the nature and application of Darwinism in the socio‐economic domain. Second, the nature of what constitutes the elements of firm‐environment interaction is considered to establish basic areas of focus through which the process of firm transformation is more understandable. Finally, the construct absorptive capacity is likened to a mechanism of transmission through which the learning processes associated with the acquisition of favoured variations can be reconciled with the generic evolutionary processes of variation, selection, and retention.

To understand the process of firm learning, the role of habits and routines must be outlined in specific detail. They cannot be assumed to perform interacting and replicating roles simultaneously. To do so undermines the fundamental qualities of an evolutionary theory.

The preliminary framework advanced takes us beyond the Darwinian‐Lamarckian debate and provides elements of focus from which a greater understanding of the process of firm/industry transformation is possible.

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.

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.

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.

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