The Evolutionary Metaphor: A Synthetic Framework for the Study of Strategic Organization
提出进化逻辑作为战略组织研究的综合框架，整合个体、组织和行业层面的现象，帮助学者在理性选择理论之外构建模型，适用于多层级动态分析。
When theorizing about strategic organization, researchers can walk securely in the shadow of rational choice theory, the over-arching paradigm for teleological models of strategic organization or, so to speak, they can take their chances. It is easy enough to grant that not all strategic behavior can be explained in terms of strategic intent coupled to strategic opportunity, but there is no framework that guides researchers in the sphere between strategically planned action and pure chance analogous to the way in which rational choice theory guides researchers who seek strategic purpose in the explanation of every organizational outcome. Theorizing and model-building about strategic organization beyond the shadow of rational choice would greatly benefit from a middle-of-theroad, balanced yet over-arching, model-generating, structural framework. Like rational choice theory, such a framework should ideally function as a tool for integrating individual, organizational and industry-level phenomena, because these multiple levels interact, and a common language is needed to study these interactions. Evolutionary logic provides this common language: rigorous enough to generate relational and dynamic models at multiple levels of analysis, yet conceptually rich enough to accommodate models, theories and empirical findings that have accumulated to date. We would like to show how evolutionary logic 1 provides an integrative framework for the multi-level study of strategic organizational phenomena, and what a research programme in strategic organization that uses such an integrative framework would look like. Thinking of organizational phenomena in terms of evolutionary processes ‐ processes of blind variation, selection and retention of a favored characteristic feature ‐ has already provided an attractive set of models for looking at the dynamics of firms in a particular industry (Hannan and Freeman, 1989), strategies within a population of firms (Weibull, 1995), design methodologies within an industry (Baldwin and Clark, 2000), routines and behaviors within a single firm (Bruderer and Singh, 1996), and even