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The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the use of the evolutionary approach, and in particular the generalisation of Darwinian principles beyond biology to study socio‐cultural change.

The paper presents a review of developments in generalising Darwinism to study socio‐cultural change, including key criticisms against using the approach. In the process key disagreements between the different conceptual approaches taken by evolutionary scholars, and key criticisms against using an evolutionary approach are highlighted.

It was seen that a number of critics fail to grasp the abstracted concept of Universal and Generalised Darwinism, focusing their arguments on detailed differences between socio‐cultural and biological evolution. Future research within the field should be directed towards building consensus regarding the definitions of key concepts, and using detailed empirical investigations to shed light on the usefulness of the different approaches taken for research and practice.

The key contribution of this paper is the presentation of a critical review of developments made in generalising Darwinism. It is further argued that the universal appeal of the approach offers researchers an opportunity for cross‐fertilising ideas, generating new insights across disciplines and learning from developments being made in parallel fields of study.

The purpose of this paper is to identify leadership behaviours that appear to be salient in life science firms and to explain them as Darwinian adaptations to the particular characteristics of that industry.

This work used a pragmatist, inductive, mode 2 research methodology. The method used semi-structured, laddered, qualitative interviews with 23 individuals from 22 firms in the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors.

The work found four aspects of the industry’s external environment that, collectively, distinguish it from other sectors. Further, it found four leadership behaviours that appear to be strongly characteristic of the industry. Further analysis revealed critical antecedents of these behaviours in the form of micro-foundations. Finally, these behaviours and their antecedents appeared to be a Darwinian adaptation to selection pressures created by the external environment.

The findings of this work are limited to the life sciences sector and do not support generalization beyond this sector. The work has three implications. Firstly, that leadership behaviours can be seen as at least partly sector-specific. Secondly, that the specificity of leadership behaviours appears related to identifiable characteristics of the industry environment. Thirdly, that the principles of generalized Darwinism provide a useful lens for understanding leadership behaviour in this sector.

This work implies that leadership training and development should recognize the specific industry context of the leader and not assume that leadership behaviour is a general, non-specific set of behaviours. Further, the work implies that appropriate leadership can be more readily enabled by paying attention to certain micro-foundations.

This work is original in two ways. Firstly, it addresses the leadership behaviours of the life sciences sector specifically. No previous work has done this. Secondly, it applies generalized Darwinism to the topic of leadership, which has not been attempted previously.

Geoffrey Hodgson would like to change all this with his Evolution of Institutional Economics: Agency, Structure, and Darwinism in American Institutionalism (2004). Hodgson writes as both an economic theorist and an historian of economic thought, and he argues that in the history of Institutional Economics in America resides a valuable legacy upon which contemporary theorists can build. In truth, Hodgson’s book must be read together with his recent How Economics Forgot History; The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (2001), where he has argued for the importance of historical reasoning to economists.

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.

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.

The influence of ideas is a central but puzzling problem in the social sciences. Parsons insisted that ideas play a central role in social continuity as well as in social change. Basic ideas that organise experience become embedded in the public mind and structure the ways in which issues are tackled. Through much of the twentieth century, Darwinism, Freudianism and Marxism are central clusters of ideas. On a smaller scale, ideas that begin in academic settings can quite quickly spread into politics. Voegelin has detected very general notions that may structure whole eras, calling one of the most powerful in our time the “new gnosticism”. It draws on our ideas of knowledge and leads to the search for a universal ideology that dissolves all problems into demands for a totalitarian society. This paper argues that there is always an underlying basis for the power of ideas. Many ideologies of our time have been twists and turns on the Christian tradition. The form they take depends on the challenges of the hour and the nature of the surrounding cultures.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the factors that influenced the establishment of modern management into the pervasive force it is today. It briefly describes modern management and discusses the reasons for this gap in knowledge in such a critical area. The main analysis of the paper focuses on the following social ideas and influences that created the conditions for modern management to be formed and established: social Darwinism and religion, the rise of social science, the promise of the scientific method, and the perspectives of the business tycoons.

This paper analyzes the prevailing trends of the late 1800 s to determine which had the greatest influence on the formation of modern management.

This paper concludes that the greatest factors on the establishment of modern management were social Darwinism and the promise of the scientific method. These, then, provided the perfect environment for Frederick W. Taylor to become the embodiment and popularizer of modern management. Perhaps, surprisingly, Christianity had little influence.

Now that the prevailing influences of modern management have been surfaced, scholars and practitioners can more effectively critique the current state of management and determine whether legacy assumptions and influences are still valid, or whether modern management should change in some way(s) to better reflect accurate assumptions and influences operative today. The anonymous reviewers of this paper have found this analysis to be provocative and challenging. They have also concluded that a single article cannot do justice to such an important, yet relatively unexplored area. Consequently, the authors hope that other researchers will also be provoked to join in this important task.

From a historical perspective, the purpose of this paper is to show how the current New Zealand Accountants' Code of Ethics (COE) differs from the first 1927 COE. The lengthy, current COE comprises strands of thought drawn from three different philosophical positions. By contrast, New Zealand's first COE was relatively short and reflected legitimacy by character employing the concepts of virtue ethics. The concepts of virtue ethics have now largely disappeared from the latest much longer code. The current code is more legalistic and technical, implying a concern for public relations. At the same time, the current COE has become a legitimising tool for the profession to emphasise image and quality.

To illustrate the shift in practice of ethical position, the paper is informed by a recent New Zealand case of a collapsed finance company as well as some further illustrations of a failure to discharge a duty of care to the public from the United Kingdom.

The shift in the COE coupled with a shift in underlying social values contributes to what the Economist Journal describes as a steady decline in professional ethics. There has been a shift from legitimising the character of an accountant to legitimising the character of accounting. This arguable conclusion is supported by a case study in New Zealand and cites the shift in combinations of cognitive, moral and pragmatic legitimacy as drivers employed by accounting firms.

The paper uses secondary and documentary data and is informed by conceptual analysis which necessarily in the realm of ethics may be contentious.

The paper seeks to link the changing social values with changes in legitimisation and the COE to show shifts in accounting practices like the recent practice of issuing disclaimers.

Purpose – This chapter focuses on the role evolution has played in our development of politics and public policy and reviews the theoretical approaches and studies of the last decade that address biopolitics and evolution, such as the “gene-culture co-evolution theory.”

Design/methodology/approach – In this chapter some of these theoretical developments will be reviewed, including what has been called the “Synergism Hypothesis,” with particular emphasis on what is relevant for understanding the role of politics and public policy in the evolutionary process.

Findings – A new, multileveled paradigm has emerged in evolutionary biology during the past decade, one which emphasizes the role of cooperative phenomena in the evolution of complexity over time, including the evolution of socially organized species such as humankind. I refer to it as “Holistic Darwinism.”

Practical implications – This study develops an understanding of the complicated relationship between human biology and the role of evolution in shaping politics and public policy.

Originality/value – This study addresses several existing biopolitical concepts and presents new explanations and terminology for its understanding.

In much of philosophy and social theory since classical antiquity, human belief and reason have been placed in the driving seat of individual action. In particular, social theory has often taken it for granted, or even by definition, that action is motivated by reasons based on beliefs. In contrast, a minority has criticized the adoption of this ‘folk psychology’ that explains human action wholly in such ‘mind first’ terms. Critics point out that such explanations are a mere gloss on a much more complex neurophysiological reality. These dualistic and ‘mind-first’ explanations of human behavior are unable to explain adequately such phenomena as sleep, memory, learning, mental illness, or the effects of chemicals or drugs on our perceptions or actions (Bunge, 1980; Churchland, 1984, 1989; Churchland, 1986; Rosenberg, 1995, 1998; Kilpinen, 2000).