On the Explanatory Power of Generalized Darwinism: Missing Items on the Research Agenda
质疑广义达尔文主义能否作为解释社会和组织现象的可行框架，指出其研究议程上缺失的关键项目，对关注演化理论在社会科学中应用的学者有参考价值。
In a recent article in this journal, Geoffrey Hodgson points out that the notion of ‘evolution’ is widely used in organization science without authors being sufficiently clear on what exactly they mean by this term. In his article, Hodgson cleans up the terminological and conceptual confusion on evolution in organization science and positions so-called ‘generalized Darwinism’ as the only well-elaborated evolutionary framework available in social science. We doubt, however, whether in its present form generalized Darwinism itself constitutes a viable approach. In this article we argue that Hodgson and collaborators so far have failed to show that generalized Darwinism is actually capable of serving as a basis for the construction of evolutionary explanations of social and organizational phenomena. We suggest a few items that should be put on generalized Darwinism’s research agenda in order to develop it towards a viable option.