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Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to show that because the evolutionary roots of many kinds of phenotypic social phenomena can be partly traced to genotypic factors, it would be useful for social sciences to adopt a socio-biological research formula, which combines the impacts of genotypic and environmental explanatory factors.

Design/methodology/approach – The exclusion of evolutionary factors from social sciences and some previous studies using evolutionary factors is first reviewed, after which a socio-biological research formula (y=(a+b)+x) is introduced. It is hypothesized that national IQ as an important genotypic factor explains a significant part of the global variation in all kinds of phenotypic social phenomena. The hypothesis is tested and the use of the socio-biological research formula is illustrated by studies of democratization (ID-10) and human development (HDI-11).

Findings – The results of correlation analysis support the hypothesis on the evolutionary variable’s (national IQ) universal explanatory power. National IQ explains 33 percent of the variation in ID-10 and 68 percent of the variation in HDI-11. Environmental variables increase significantly the explained part of variation in a dependent variable in the case of ID-10 but less in the case of HDI-11.

Practical implications – Because it is evident that national IQ as an evolutionary variable explains a significant part of the variation in all kinds of phenotypic social phenomena, it would be sensible for social sciences to adopt the suggested socio-biological research formula based on the idea that intelligence constitutes an important common explanatory factor.

Originality/value – The suggested socio-biological research formula provides for the social sciences a common theoretical starting point to study many kinds of social problems.

This chapter proposes a novel nonnormative approach to evaluating quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of food security.

On the demand side, we consider the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of the food security system, whose mechanisms should be evaluated by their impact on the quality of life of an endangered population. On the supply side, the motives of food aid donors and food security providers (directly and via policy mechanisms) are discussed in the context of the deservingness heuristic.

The model illustrates three problems with measuring food security-related quality of life: peoples’ different expectations, the different points at which people stand on their food security trajectory, and the potential for an evolving reference value of peoples’ expectations. The deservingness heuristic is the mechanism behind the domestic and international food security aid that occurs via evolutionary forces, or cultural, institutional, and ideological forces.

Food security is a problem that requires a humanistic approach rooted in the evolutionary process/development of the human race. Food security can be misused by the food aid/welfare recipients for their own purposes. Likewise, food security programs by food aid/welfare donors can be targeted unethically when used to achieve the ideological, institutional, and political goals of the donors. Differentiating between the behavioral causes of providing food security may be helpful in predicting whether aid/welfare will be provided to the needy at all.

The purpose of the study is to propose a framework for understanding the dynamism of the human self-system from evolutionary and socio-psychological perspective. The study aims to help scholars interested to use an evolutionary lens for examining consumer behaviour.

Relying on the principle of self-cybernetics, the study proposed a general framework explaining the operating mechanism of human self-system. The proposed framework incorporates the socio-psychological and the evolutionary perspective of the human self-concept.

The framework may help consumer scholars to integrate socio-psychological and evolutionary theories to produce novel and testable hypotheses.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a framework based on the principle of cybernetics to facilitate the use of an evolutionary lens in consumer research.

The dynamic capability view reshaped the understanding of how firms can achieve a sustained competitive advantage through innovation. However, studies based on national innovation surveys have not incorporated this vision when measuring absorptive capacity, especially the evolutionary aspects of dynamic capabilities. This study addresses this gap.

We empirically validate a scale using a national innovation survey based on the Oslo Manual standards. Using a five-wave survey, we demonstrate the scale's reliability, convergent and discriminant validity and stable structure across industries and over time.

This research integrates the dynamic capability literature with absorptive capacity measurement to propose and validate a multi-item and bidimensional scale for national innovation surveys.

We provide a measurement model that captures an evolutionary conceptualization of absorptive capacity as a dynamic capability. Hence, our contribution enhances the quality and validity of studies on absorptive capacity and advances the understanding of how firms develop and deploy absorptive capacity to drive performance.

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.

In a modern world increasingly perceived as uncertain, the mere purchase of a household cleaning product, or a seemingly harmless bottle of milk, conveys interrogations about potential hazards, from environmental to health impacts. The main purpose of this paper is to suggest that risk could be considered as one of the major dimensions of choice for a wide range of concerns and markets, alongside aspiration/satisfaction, and tackled efficiently by mobilizing the recent findings of cognitive sciences, neurosciences and evolutionary psychology. It is felt that consumer research could benefit more widely from psychological and evolutionary-grounded risk theories.

In this study, some 50 years of marketing management literature, as well as risk-specialized literature, was examined in an attempt to get a grasp of how risk is handled by consumer sciences and of whether they make some use of the most recent academic works on mental biases, non-mainstream decision-making processes or evolutionary roots of behavior. We then tested and formulated several hypotheses regarding risk profiles and preferences in the sector of insurance, by participating in an Axa Research Fund–Paris School of Economics research project.

It is suggested that consumer profiles could be enriched by risk-taking attitudes, that risk could be part of the “reason why” of brand positioning, and that brand, as well as public policy communication, could benefit from a targeted use of risk perception biases.

This paper proposes to apply evolutionary-based psychological concepts to build perceptual maps describing people and consumers on both aspiration and risk attitude axis, and to design communication tools according to psychological research on message framing and biases. Such an approach mobilizes not only the recent findings of cognitive sciences and neurosciences but also the understanding of the roots of risk attitudes and perception. Those maps and framing could probably be applied to many sectors, markets and public issues, from commodities to personal products and services (food, luxury goods, electronics, financial products, tourism, design or insurance).

Purpose – In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists.

Approach – We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment.

Findings – Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Practical Implications – The focus on affective systems suggests new research agendas in leveraging emerging neurosociological methods in the laboratory, while pushing for novel, naturalistic observational strategies. The latter, in particular, may be key to deepening sociology's contributions to neuroscience, better positioned to bring the full disciplinary toolkit to bear on these questions.

Social Implications – In considering the embodied and projective aspects of the self, we show how work examining convergence and divergence between embodied and linguistic pathways opens up new insights into how the self develops or acquires behavioral repertoires. As such, this chapter points to the need for holistic approach to understanding the social actor and, thereby, how political, economic, historical, and cultural factors shape self as much as biogenetic and psychological.

Originality of the Chapter – Sociologists think of emotions as either dependent or intervening variables: (1) signaling identity or situational incongruence, (2) states to be managed, and (3) structural dimensions of superordinate–subordinate relationships. Our integration of the theory of affective systems emphasizes the causal primacy emotions have over other behavioral and cognitive functions, clarifying how they play into the construction and maintenance of self and social experience.

The ontological‐epistemological relevance of Divine Unity at the core of socio‐scientific world‐systems is developed in analytical terms and is contrasted with the scientific roots of rationalism. The versatile capability of the unity world view is seen to explain both truth and falsehood in a scientific sense. Unification is treated as the application of the knowledge flows emanating from the ontology‐epistemology of fundamental unity to world‐systems. Thus, a comprehensive theorem relating to the knowledge‐centred world view is developed and proved.

The author presents a comparative study of the three evolutionary economic schools, namely the Austrians, neo-Schumpeterians, and institutionalists. The comparison is based on an analysis of nine basic features of the evolutionary process and evolutionary approach, including a dynamical view of economic phenomena (seen from a historical perspective), a focus on far-from-equilibrium analysis, a proper and realistic perception of time, and a population perspective (to what extent emergent properties are results of interaction among economic agents). The relevant features of the evolutionary process are the heterogeneity and behavior of economic agents, the search for novelty based on a concept of economic agents’ hereditary information, a selection process (based on the concept of rivalry), spontaneity of development, and the presence of decision-making procedures (how economic agents make decisions, and to what extent their subjective values play a role). The goal of the comparative analysis is to estimate the level of “evolutionary content” of the three schools. My subjective evaluation suggests that only the Austrian school can be called entirely evolutionary. Slightly less evolutionary are the neo-Schumpeterians, and the least evolutionary are the institutionalists.