Three Facets of Organizational Adaptation: Selection, Variety, and Plasticity
区分了组织适应的三种机制：选择、变异和可塑性，并通过计算模型探讨了可塑性在促进适应性学习的同时如何削弱选择过程的有效性和实践执行的可靠性。
When considering the adaptive dynamics of organizations, it is important to account for the full set of adaptive mechanisms, including not only the possibility of learning and adaptation of a given behavior but also the internal selection over some population of routines and behaviors. In developing such a conceptual framework, it is necessary to distinguish between the underlying stable roots of behavior and the possibly adaptive expression of those underlying templates. Selection occurs over expressed behavior. As a result, plasticity, the capacity to adapt behavior, poses a trade-off as it offers the possibility of adaptive learning but at the same time mitigates the effectiveness of selection processes to identify more or less superior underlying roots of behavior. In addition, plasticity may mitigate the reliability with which practices are enacted. These issues are explored in the context of a computational model, which examines the interrelationship among processes of variation, selection, and plasticity.