The Evolution of Business: Cultivating Flourishing for Organizations and Their Stakeholders (original) (raw)

Darwinism, organizational evolution and survival: key challenges for future research

Journal of Management & Governance, 2015

How do social organizations evolve? How do they adapt to environmental pressures? What resources and capabilities determine their survival within dynamic competition? Charles Darwin's seminal work The Origin of Species (1859) has provided a significant impact on the development of the management and organization theory literatures on organizational evolution. This article introduces the JMG Special Issue focused on Darwinism, organizational evolution and survival. We discuss key themes in the organizational evolution research that have emerged in recent years. These include the increasing adoption of the co-evolutionary approach, with a particular focus on the definition of appropriate units of analysis, such as routines, and related challenges associated with exploring the relationship between co-evolution, re-use of knowledge, adaptation, and exaptation processes. We then introduce the three articles that we have finally accepted in this Special Issue after an extensive, multi-round, triple blind-review process. We briefly outline how each of these articles contributes to understanding among scholars, practitioners and policy makers of the continuous evolutionary processes within and among social organizations and systems.

The Evolution of Business: Learning, Innovation, and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century

World Futures, 2003

This paper -as part of a broader evolutionary inquiry toward human fulfillment, societal wellbeing, and environmental sustainability -explores new frontiers for business. In a rapidly changing global environment, corporations can become evolutionary change agents for the creation of a sustainable global civilization by fostering financial, social, and environmental results.

Flourishing Organizations

2017

In this paper, I seek to answer the following question: What makes organizations flourish? My ontological standpoint is that organizations are living, open systems created and developed by people who are unceasingly and dynamically evolving, learning and developing. Appreciative inquiry (hereafter AI), as a form of action research, changes the focus from problem solving to developing organizations based on their strengths. The life-giving forces of 29 organizations in Finland were ascertained during a four-year period of research. Groups of Master’s students collected and analysed qualitative data from 319 interviews, where they asked “unconditional positive questions”. This paper presents a synthesis of the findings of these students’ inquiries. The findings assert that discovering what provides joy and happiness for people in work serves as a strong basis for them to dream, design and maximize their own and their organization’s destiny in the future.

Positive Organization Development

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2011

This chapter presents a framework for innovation-inspired positive organization development (IPOD); IPOD is presented as both a radical break from the problem solving approaches that have come to dominate the field, as well as a homecoming to OD's original affirmative spirit. The converging fields that inform the theory and practice of IPOD are detailed: appreciative inquiry, positive organizational scholarship, positive psychology, design theory, and the rise of sustainable enterprises. The theory of change underlying IPOD is articulated, including the three stages in creating strengths-based organizational innovation: the elevation-and-extension of strengths, the broadening-and-building of capacity, and the establishment of the new-and-eclipsing of the old. Recent work from the city of Cleveland, Ohio, illustrates how these stages unfold. The chapter concludes with an agenda for evolving the field of IPOD, calling for a focus on designing positive institutions that refract and magnify our highest human strengths outward into society.

Understanding Organizational Evolution: Toward a Research Agenda using Generalized Darwinism

Organization Studies, 2013

The terms ‘evolution’ and ‘coevolution’ are widely used in organization studies but rarely defined. Often it is unclear whether they refer to single entities or populations. When specific evolutionary processes are suggested, the labelling is often misleading. For example, in the debate over the roles of individual adaptation and competitive selection, the ‘selectionist’ position of Michael Hannan and John Freeman, which emphasizes the role of selection and stress the limits of individual firm adaptability, is often described as ‘Darwinian’ whereas opposing views that emphasize adaptability are described as ‘Lamarckian’. But these labels are not strictly dichotomous. Scholars have shown that core Darwinian principles, resulting from abstract ontological communality rather than analogy, apply to social evolution. This opens up a research agenda using the principles of generalized Darwinism and the replicator–interactor framework to help understand the evolution of organizations. Some...

Evolutionary Studies in Business: A Presentation of a New Journal

Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business-JESB, 2016

The Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business is a new open access journal led by an international interdisciplinary team of scholars located in eight institutions from three continents who wants to attract contributions that help shed light on the new questions, challenges, methodologies and realities, faced by businesses in an evolutionary perspective. The journal calls particularly for review essays that deal with new research topics about business, and provide useful overviews of the key ideas, scholars, and debates about important research topics concerning business and its environment.

Positive Organization Development: Innovation-inspired Change in an Economy and Ecology of Strengths

This article presents a framework for Innovation-inspired Positive Organization Development (IPOD). IPOD is presented as both a radical break from the problem solving approaches that have come to dominate the field, as well as a homecoming to OD's original affirmative spirit. The converging fields that inform the theory and practice of IPOD are detailed: Appreciative Inquiry, positive organizational scholarship, positive psychology, design theory, and the rise of sustainable enterprises. The theory of change underlying IPOD is articulated, including the three stages in creating strengths-based organizational innovation: 1) the elevation-and-extension of strengths, 2) the broaden-and-building of capacity, and 3) the establishment of the new-and-eclipsing of the old. Recent work from the city of Cleveland, Ohio illustrates how these stages unfold. The chapter concludes with an agenda for evolving the field of IPOD, calling for a focus on designing positive institutions that refract and magnify our highest human strengths outward into society.