History and Evolutionary Theory

Abstract

A persistent division exists between historical and deductive approaches to explaining organizational dynamics. Historical studies adopt a ‘narrative/interpretive’ approach favoring historical contingency and the uniqueness of cases. In contrast, the ‘deductive/structural’ approach posits universal organizational processes and general explanations. This chapter argues that evolutionary theory offers a framework for integrating the strengths of these two approaches and producing more robust organizational theory. Evolutionary theory rests on three vital processes—variation, selection, and retention—that provide universal explanations of organizational structure and change, while taking seriously contextual and case-specific characteristics. Four areas are identified in which evolutionary theory offers a bridge between the divergent approaches, including the importance of contextualizing explanations, increasing the generalizability of findings, recognizing the role of unique events, and taking account of the uniqueness of cases. As a meta-theoretical approach, evolutionary theory allows scholars to integrate findings from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and historical processes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.