Cultural Evolution of the Firm

Weeks, J. and Galunic, Ch. . A Theory of the Cultural Evolution of the Firm: The Intra-Organizational Ecology of Memes . Organization Studies 24(8): 1309-1352 Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA & New Delhi) . 0170-8406[200310]24:8;1309-1352;036074 . 2013

A theory of the cultural evolution of the firm is proposed. Evolutionary and cultural thinking is applied to the questions: What are firms and why do they exist? It is argued that firms are best thought of as cultures, as ‘social distributions of modes of thought and forms of externalization’. This culture encompasses cultural modes of thought (ideas, beliefs, assumption, values, interpretative schema, and know-how). Members of a group enact the memes they have acquired as part of the culture. Memes spread from mind to mind as they are enacted; the resulting cultural patterns are observed and interpreted by others. This refers to the meeting of content and process: as memes are enacted the ‘physical’ topology of the culture changes and as a consequence the context for the decisions of other changes. Variation in memes occurs through interpretation during communication and the re-interpretation in different contexts. The approach of taking the meme’s eye view allows a descriptive and non-normative theory of firms.

Introduction

Firm theory: Why do we have firms? (and to what extent do they have us?). Firms have a cultural influence on people and that is why it is difficult to answer the question of why firms exist: we believe we need them because we were schooled in believing that. ‘They serve our purposes because they have a hand in defining those purposes and evaluating their achievement’ (p 1309). Assuming this is true then a functionalist approach, treating firms as if they are people’s tools, doesn’t help to understand why firms function as they do. It is not sufficient to start at a normative model and explain away the rest as noise as is the common practice with firm theorists; as a start they assume that firms should exist (for instance because of a supposed performance advantage over market forms of coordination) and that these theoretical advantages would pan out in practice. It is argued that a truly descriptive theory of the firm takes seriously the idea that firms are fundamentally cultural in nature and that culture evolves.

Existing theories of the firm

1) Transaction cost economics (Coase, Williamson): individuals will organize in a firm rather than contract in a market because firms are efficient contractual instruments; this organization economizes transaction costs. A contender is knowledge based firm theory (Conner and Prahalad, Kogut and Zander, Grant) positing that firms are better than markets at applying and integrating knowledge to business activity. These theories are complementary in the sense that they share the idea that business organizations exist because they offer some economic advantage to members. This theory makes a further attempt at enhancing purely economic theories of the firm. This theory reaches beyond the idea of a firm as a knowledge bearing entity to a culture bearing entity, where culture is a much wider concept of ideas than mere knowledge. In addition it is required to understand that some elements will enhance the organization’s performance and further the interests of its members and other will not. The theory must explain both. In addition the theory must explain how a firm functionally evolves if it is not towards an optimum in a best of possible worlds while aberrations are minimalized.

Defining Characteristics of the Firm

In transaction cost economics, the difference between a market and a firm is defined by authority (Coase). If B is hired by A to reduce the transaction cost of the market, then A controls the performance of B and hierarchy is introduced, whereas in a market A and B are autonomous: hierarchies and markets differ in how they exert control. The word ‘firm’ denotes the name under which the business of a commercial house is transacted, its symbol of identity (Oxford English Dictionary). It came to refer to a partnership for carrying on a business and then expanded to a broad definition of any sort of business organization. Hierarchy is common in business organizations, but it is not the defining attribute. The defining difference between market and firm is not only control but also identity; this is a key insight of the knowledge based view (Kogut and Zander 1992). People express this identity in their shared culture (Kogut and Zander 1996); the identity reflects participation in a shared culture. The knowledge based view claims that it is this shared culture that affords firms their lower transaction costs compared to the market. However, culture is left exogenous in the knowledge-based theory and in the transaction-based theory; culture is presupposed in both.

Assumptions

Bounded rationality: only if people are fully rational is the neo-classical assumption of rationality justified. In that case the organizational advantage over markets is limited and this assumption of transaction-based economics is invalid. If agents are unable to construct contracts with one another as autonomous agents is it valid. Similarly if no threat of opportunism exists and everybody is fully trustworthy (and known to be so) then organizations bring no additional advantage over the markets, market operations and firm operations imply the same transaction costs. Because this element is of a weak form (it suffices if some agents are unreliable), this is a realistic assumption. The third assumption is the functionalism: not only should transaction cost be economized, but given time and sufficient competitive forces (Williamson and Ouchi 1981: 363-364: 10 years). However, for the transaction cost theory to be descriptive, it needs an explanation of the identification and realization of the efficiency of the economies of the costs of transactions; how do economic agents know the origins, the effects of the cost and how do they know how to economize on them? This requires strong assumptions of neo-classical competition and human rationality. The knowledge-based firm theory is also functional and it is assumed that: 1) the interests of the individual and the enterprise are aligned and 2) individuals can and will always identify the relation between performance and business organization and market respectively when deciding whether to establish a firm or definitely be selected out in time. Firms are theorized to do better than markets is to share and transfer knowledge between members of the organization, individuals and groups, because of the shared identity. This shared identity is built through culture and this takes time; not only does it allow capturing of specific knowledge, also it limits the kind of future knowledge can be further captured and exploited.

An evolutionary model is more suitable: firms evolve as cultures and this need not be functional from the point of view of the organization as a whole. Cultural patterns do not necessarily arise among a social group because they benefit the members of the group equally: power may result in the benefiting of some members more than others, some elements of organizations even though carefully managed do not benefit every member equally and some elements seem not to benefit or disadvantage anyone. Culture seems to be an emergent phenomenon and even organizations that were created for specific purposes tend not to dissolve after having met them, but rather tend to adapt their goals for new purposes unforeseen by their founders.

Intra-organizational Perspective

Individuals learn more about organizations if they are more and longer involved with them, but they are likely to not learn all of it and seldom to accept all that is learned. This is called ‘population thinking’ (Ernst Mayer): every member of the organization has an interpretation resulting in a scatter of cultural elements that they carry and reproduce in a slightly different way. The scatter results in a center of gravity (or a contour) of the prototypical culture of the firm. The interpretation of the culture by each member is a variation to that prototype. None of them might be exactly the same but they have what Wittgenstein calls the ‘family resemblance’: ’They share enough of the beliefs and values and meanings and language to be recognized and to recognize themselves as part of the culture’ (p 1316) NB: this prototype resembles the organization of the autopoietic system that keeps it intact as a unity and that gives it its identity such as to allow it to be recognized by an observer. The entire scatter of cultural elements that builds the firms culture is the structure. Those elements that are dispensable are structure, those that are not are also part of the organization of the autopoietic system that is the firms culture. Complications: 1) how is the social distribution formed and how does it change over time? A theory is needed for the ecology of the cultural elements as well as how they change as they spread over the organization and how a flow of new cultural elements enter the firm and has an impact on existing culture 2) How do the careers of cultural elements develop over time. Memes refer to cultural modes of thought values, beliefs, assumptions, know-how &c. ‘Culture results from the expression of memes, their enactment in patterns of behavior and language and so forth’ (p 1317). Studying evolution of culture it is important to keep in mind that memes have a meanings in the context of other memes.

A firm theory based on knowledge-based firm theory must take into account not only knowledge but culture; it must be evolutionary so as to account for the firms’ changes over time, while a ‘use’ or a ‘purpose’ for some or all of the members of the population is not required for the change to take place.

Memes: The Unit of Cultural Selection

What this means is that the overall, intricate patterns of culture that we call firms are not the best understood as the result of the conscious and coherent designs of astonishing organizational leaders. Instead, for better or for worse, they emerge step-by-step out of the interactions of intendedly rational people making what sense they can of their various situations, pursuing their various aims, and often acting in ways that they have difficulty explaining, even to themselves’ (p 1318)

The key to evolution in the sense of an algorithm providing selection, variation and retention is that it postulates a population of replicators but it does not make assumptions about what those can be. Assuming that the environment stays the same, then every next generation will be slightly better adapted to that environment than the previous one. Competition is assumed for some scarce resource, be it food, air or human attention. Retention assumes the ability of a replicator to be copied accurately. ‘Firms and markets are cultural entities. They have evolved in the same way any part of culture evolves: though selection, variation and retention of memes. Memes are the replicators in cultural evolution. They are the modes of thought (ideas, assumptions, values, beliefs and know-how) that when they are enacted (as language and other forms of expression)create the macro-level patterns of culture. Memes are units of information stored in the brain that replicate from brain to brain as people observe and interpret their cultural expression. .. Memes are the genes of culture. Just as plants and animals and all biological organisms are the phenotypic expression of particular combinations of genes, so cultural patterns such as firms are the phenotypic expression of particular combinations of memes’ (p 1320)

Small Replicators

Genes are the replicators, not the organism. Organisms exist because they are a good way to replicate. Memes are the replicators, not people and not culture. But those memes that are part of firms replicate more than those who aren’t. ‘We have the firms that we do, in other words, not because they are necessarily good for society or good for their members (though often they are both), but fundamentally because they are good was for memes to replicate themselves’(p 1321). To study a firm in this sense is the equivalent of studying ecology: selection but not variation nor retention. Firms do not replicate themselves in toto; selection, however, is theorized as occurring to this object in its entirety. A unit of selection is required that is smaller than the firm as a whole.

Systemic Elements and Social Phenomena

First premise: memes are small and analytically divisible. Second premise: the environment where the selection of memes takes place principally includes other memes. The memes build on themselves and they do so according to the ‘bricoleur principle’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 17): building on making use of the materials at hand. Memes are recycled and recombined, informing and constraining the creation of new memes. Some are implicated more than others. NB: here the existence of culture is confused with the existence of memes. The latter are the tools for thought and culture is built of their enactment. And so memes are the experiments (anything that can be uttered) and culture is their expression in the physical world, even spoken, gestured & written (anything that is in fact uttered). ‘In firms, these fundamental memes are akin to what Schein ((1992) calls basic assumptions. They are deeply held assuumptions about the nature of reality and truth, about time aand space, and about the nature of human nature, human activity, and human relationships (Schein 1992: pp. 95-6). When these are widely shared in a culture, they tend to be taken for granted and therefore pass unnoticed. They structure the way firm members think of the mission and goals of the firm, its core competencies, and the way things are done in the firm. Often borrowed and reinterpreted from some part of the wider context in which the firm is located, they are central to the identity of the firm and the identity the firm affords its members. The concept of meme must be robust enough to include these taken-for-granted assumptions if it is to serve usefully as the unit of selection in a theory of the cultural evolution of the firm’ (p 1323). NB This does not explain clearly whence memes come. My premises is that the firm is a cultural pattern originating in the memes that stem from the commonly held beliefs in a society. Not that they merely structure goals and mission, but that they are the stuff of them. There is indeed a relation between the memes and the identity of the firm. There is no mention of the belief systems and more specifically belief in the idea of progress, ala capitalism &c.

Why Memes

Meme is the umbrella term for the category containing all cultural modes of thought. Memes are cultural modes of thought. The concept preserves the distinction between modes of thought and their forms of externalization: the memes in people’ s heads and the ways they talk and act and the artifacts they produce as a product of enacting those memes. ‘The firm is a product of memes in the way that the fruit fly is the product of genes’ (p 1324): a distinction is possible between particular elements of culture and the memes that correspond to them. ‘Memes, the unit of selection, are in the mind. Culture, on the other hand, is social. Culture reflects the enactment of memes. Culture is a social phenomenon that is produced and continuously reproduced through the words and actions of individuals as they selectively enact the memes in their mind. Culture may be embedded in objects or symbols, but it requires an interpreting mind to have meaning and to be enacted’ (p 1324)

With memes in Mind

Without human minds to enact it and interpret it, there is no culture: ‘Memes spread as they are replicated in the minds of people perceiving and interpreting the words and actions and artifacts (compare Hannerz 1992: 3-4; Sperber 1996: 25). They vary as they are enacted and reinterpreted’ (p 1324). A change in culture can be seen as a change in the social distribution of the memes among the members of the population carrying that culture. NB: the social distribution trick gets rid of the meme – culture difference. A change in memes produces different enactment in turn produces different culture resulting in different cultural products such as utterances and artifacts. From the existence of phenotypic traits, the existence of genes and their relation to that phenotype (that property) can with some considerable difficulty be inferred through a reverse engineering exercise. The analog statement is that from cultural features the existence of these particular memes that caused those features can be inferred. This statement is of a statistical nature: ‘He is implicitly saying: there is variation in eye color in the population; other things being equal, a fly with this gene is more likely to have red eyes than a fly without the gene. That is all we ever mean by a gene ‘for’ red eyes’ (p 1325, Dawkins 1982: 21). Concerning the substance of memes and the way it is enacted in culture: ‘Studies of psychological biases (Kahneman and Tversky 1973) can help us to understand ways in which the make-up of our brains themselves may shape the selection of memes’ (p 1326).

The Meme’s-Eye View

The essence is that not survival of the organism but survival of the genes best capable to reproduce themselves. These statements are usually congruent: whatever works for the organism works for the gene and the genes best suitable to reproduce are inside the fittest organism. The Maltusian element of Darwin’s theory is that evolution is about selection based on competition for a scarce resource; in the case of memes the scarce resource is human attention. Memes compete to be noticed, to be internalized and to be reproduced. Memes can gain competitive advantage by their recognized contribution to the firms performance; misunderstanding or mismanagement can lead to reproduction of the wrong memes by management. If firms would be subject to competition and the least successful would die out at each generation then the most successful would thrive in time: ‘We hold that a theory of the firm must be able to explain not why we should have firms, but why we do have the firms (good, bad, and ugly alike) that we have’ (p 1327). NB: This is too modest and I do not agree: before anything can be said about their characteristics, an explanation must be in place about the raison d’ for firms, why does something like a firm exist? But why this limitation of the scope of the explanation?

Mechanisms of Selection, Variation, and Retention

Selection. A meme is internalized when the cultural expression corresponding to it is observed and interpreted by a member of the firm. NB: Is not a form of memorization required such that the observation and enactment are independent in time and ready for enactment? A meme is selected when it is enacted. ‘At any point in time, the pattern of selection events acting on a given variation of memes across the firm defines the ecology of memes in the firm’ (p 1327) NB: Firstly it defines the culture in the firm as the expressions of actions, the enactments of the memes hosted by individuals; those enactments in turn harbor memes and those remain for other members to observe, to interpret and at to enact at some occasion. Selective pressures on memes are: function, fit and form. Function: members believe that some function is served when a particular meme is enacted. This is not straightforward because 1) functionality is wrongly defined because reality and the reaction to it is complex, especially given that people are boundedly rational. Events will conspire to ensure that ill-functioning memes are selected against: members notice that they do not lead to the aspired goal and stop reproducing them. If not they may be removed from their position or the part of the firm or the entire firm is closed. For myriad reasons (p 1328), members may not deviate from their belief in the functional underpinning for a particular meme and they keep reproducing it; therefore function is not a strong argument for the selection of memes. 2) Fit: the manner in which a meme fits into a population of other memes and the memes that fit with other dominant memes stand a better chance of survival: ‘Institutional theory emphasizes that organizations are open systems – strongly influenced by their environments – but that many of the most fateful forces are the result not of rational pressures for more effective performance but of social and cultural pressures to conform to conventional beliefs’ (Scott 1992: 118 in p 1329) NB: this is crucial: the beliefs deliver memes that deliver culture hen they are enacted. The feedback loop is belief > memes > culture > memes > culture and performance is a cultural by-product. How does the produced culture feed back into the memes? ‘Powell and DiMaggio (1991: 27-28) describe this environment as a system of ‘cultural elements, that is, taken-for-granted beliefs and widely promulgated rules that serve as templates for organizing’. In other words, as a system of memes’ (p 1329). NB: this is complex of just-so stories guiding everyday practice. ‘The memetic view shares a central assumption with institutional theory: choices and preferences cannot be properly understood outside the cultural and historical frameworks in which they are set (Powell and DiMaggio 1991: 10). Our perspective, our identity, is a cumulative construction of the memes we carry (see Cohen and Levinthal 1990; Le Doux 2002). We are a product of our memes’ (p 1329) NB: this is a long and generalized version of the memes originating in a belief in the idea of progress. ‘By focusing analysis on the social distributions of memes within the firm, rather than assuming the firm is a monolith that adapts uniformly to its competitive or institutional environment, the memetic view suggests that its isomorphism is always imperfect, and that there are always sources of variation that may evolve into important organizational traits’ (p 1330). NB: this is the equivalent of the monadic view: as perfect as possible given circumstances and time, but never quite perfect. Also the identity of the firm as a consequence of the autopoietic organization and the structure is develops and that adds additional traits to the identity but that can be selected away without losing its identity as a unity. 3) Memes can be selected for their form: the morphology of genetic expressions may influence reproductive success; the ease with which an idea can be imitated is correlated to its actual reproductive success (urban legend, disgustingness, sound bite, self-promotion in the sense of piggybacking on others so as to be reproduced more often and in the sense of creating more network externalities (Blackmore on altruism), catchyness, stickyness).

Variation

Novel combinations of memes and altogether new memes. NB if a memeplex is an autopietic system then it is closed to external information. It is a linguistic system. Signals are received and trigger the system to react to them. But no information is actually transferred; this implies that memes stay inside the memeplex and that other members carrying other memeplexes copy based on what they perceive is the effect of the meme in another member in their context. A distinction is made into mutation and migration of memes. The latter does not exist in in autopoietic systems. Hiring is limited because of the tendency to hire those who are culturally close to the firm as is; and the effect of firing severs the availability of their views. Different backgrounds of people in a firm are seen as a source of diversity of memes. NB: how does this idea match autopoiesis?

A difference is pointed out between potential variation and realized variation: the number of new memes that come available to the members of the firm versus the number of new memes that are actually realized. ‘If there is ‘information overload’ and ‘information anxiety’, then it is to a great extent because people cannot confidently enough manage the relationship between the entire cultural inventory and their reasonable personal share in it’ (Hannerz 1992: 32 in p 1332). In this way an increase in the potential memetic variety can lead to a decrease in the realized memetic variety. Whether a relation exists between the potential and the realized in evolving systems is unclear. ‘But an evolutionary perspective, and an understanding of the firm as an ecology of memes, should make us a little more humble about predicting unidirectional outcomes between such things as diversity and performance’ (p 1333). Mutation is a source of variation via misunderstandings. These are in practical terms the rule rather than the exception, especially if conveyed not via written or even spoken word. The final source of variation is recombination: move around the group and then actual recombination. NB: this is the preferred version in an autopoietic system.

Retention

Key elements are 1) longevity, 2) fidelity, and 3) fecundity. 1) Longevity is about the firm reproducing itself through the actions of individuals as they conduct recurring social practices and thereby incorporate and reproduce constituent rules and ideas, memes, of the firm. ‘In other words, firm activity is not a fixed object, but a constant pattern of routine activity that reproduces the memes that express these routines’ (p 1335). NB: routine activity in this phrase resembles the organization of an autopoietic system 2) Fidelity means how accurately memes are copied. This is an advantage over markets. ‘The defining elements of the firm (its characteristic patterns of control and identity) provide for meme retention. Control in firms means that employees accept to a relatively greater degree than in markets that they may be told how to behave and even how to think. They accept, in other words, reproducing certain memes and not others’ (p 1335). NB: this is a key notion: based on this definition of control in firms, this is the effect that firms have as the context (ambience) for their employees: they get to copy some desired memes and not others. I have a difficulty with the word ACCEPT in this context: how does it relate to the concept of free will and the presumed lack of it? ‘Those memes that become part of the firm’s identity become less susceptible to change (Whetten and Godfrey 1998). Being consistent with dominant memes in the firm becomes a selection factor for other memes, which further reinforces fidelity’ (p 1336). NB: Copy-the-product versus copy-the-instruction. 3) Fecundity refers to the extent to which a meme is diffused in the firm. This depends on the mind that the meme currently occupies: the more senior the member, the higher the chance that the meme gets replicated. ‘The cultural apparatus includes all those specializations within the division of labor which somehow aim at affecting minds, temporarily or in a enduring fashion; the people and institutions whose main purpose it is to meddle with our consciousness’ (Hannerz 1992: 83). This was meant to apply to societies (media &c.), but it can be used for firms just the same, especially because it is assumed to part of the standard outfit of firms that some groups of people meddle with the minds of other groups.

Why Do Firms Exist?

Why has the cultural evolution process led to a situation where the memes bundle together as firms?’ (p 1337). The scope of the answer is in the bundling of the memes (into patterns of control and identity) such that they have a competitive advantage over others; why do memes that are a part of firms replicate more often than memes that are not a part of a firm? NB: Weeks and Galunic are mistakenly assuming that memes in firms benefit their host by offering them an advantage (p 1338). ‘A cultural and evolutionary theory also forces us to recognize that the reasons firms came into existence are not necessarily the reasons this form persists now’(p 1338). Two questions arise: 1) what are the historical origins of the evolution of the firm and 2) why does the concept of the firm persist until today? Ad 1 origins) the idea is that large (US) firms exist around 50 years. The concept started as a family-run firms and grew from that form to a larger corporate form. As the scale of the business grew it was not longer possible to oversee it for one man and so management emerged, including the functional areas of production, procurement &c. ‘From a meme’s-eye view, we would say that these memes produced cultural effects with a tremendous functional selection advantage, but they did so only when bundled with each other. This bundling was made possible by the enacted identity and control memes of the firm. Thus, together, both sets of memes flourished’ (p 1339). ‘In evolutionary terms, this pattern is to be expected. Through bundling, replicators can combine in ways that produce more complex expressions that are better to compete for resources (such as human attention in the case of memes), but this bundling requires some apparatus to be possible. In our case, this apparatus consists of the memes that enact the firm’ (p 1340). NB: Because of their complexity they are better suited to compete because they better manage to retain bundles of memes for business functions such as production, procurement and distribution. Firms enhanced the faithful reproduction and enactment of those memes; they have reduced variation.

Persistence

Once the bundle of memes we call the firm had emerged, the logic of its evolution changed somewhat and the possibility of group selection emerged’ (p 1340). NB: I don’t believe that the concept of the firm has changed since it was initially conceived: it must be mirrored. Also as an autopoietic system it has to have existed as a unity and an organization, a unity from the outset in whatever slim shape. It cannot ‘emerge’ from nothingness and evolve into something.’There is always a balance in any evolving system between the longevity offered by retention at the level of the individual meme and for adaptation at the level of of the bundle of memes. The firm emerged because of the reproductive advantages it gave memes, but it persisted because it was also able to provide more effective variation and selection processes’ (p 1340). NB: this is about the diffusion of administrative and managerial processes.

Retention

Firms offer memes advantages of retention as a result of: 1) control: peole can be told what to do and what to think 2) the identity that employees develop towards their firms, which brings them to hold certain memes close and protect them against different ideas. ‘Control and identity come together in firms by virtue of the legitimacy granted generally by society and specifically by employees to managers of firms to impose and manipulate corporate culture and thus the assumptions, beliefs, values, and roles internalized by employees and enacted by them not only in the organization (when management may be looking to ensure displays of compliance) but outside as well’ (p 1341). NB: I find this still not entirely satisfactory, because I am convinced that the memes carried by management may be somewhat more specialized than those of the people outside the firm, but the general ideas are widely known and carried by members of society. A firm could not exist in a society where some of the memes that compose a firm do not exist or are not believed to be true. ‘Without very much exaggeration we might say that firms are systems of contractual docility. They are structures that ensure, for the most part, that members find it in their self-interest to be tractable, manageable and, above all, teachable’ (p 1341). The economy for an incumbent meme to be added to the memeplex is described as follows: ‘When you can give ideas away and retain them at the same time, you can afford to be generous. In contrast, it is less easy to maintain allegiance to any number of contradictory ideas, and especially to act in line with all of them. Thus, if somebody accepts your ideas and therefore has to discard or reject competing ideas, in belief or in action, he may really be more generous than you are as a donor’ (Hannerz 1992: 104 in p 1341). NB: members protect memes because they are a product of them. Firms through their efforts of dedicated management to replicate meme high-fidelity and their firm-specific language, facilitate the retention of memes in the minds of their members.

Apart from control and authority, firms provide identity for members. At the core of institutional thinking two elements are held: 1) human actors are susceptible to merging their identity with that of the firms and 2) to be an institution presupposes some stable core memes as attractors of social union. Ad 1 identity) people are inclined to collective enterprise for a need to cooperate (Axelrod 1997) and from a natural tendency to seek and adopt moral order (Durkheim 1984; Weber 1978): ‘This is the sense in which the firms have us as much as we have them: they socialize us, fill our heads with their memes, which shape our sense of identity and which we carry, reproduce, and defend outside the organization as well as inside’ (p 1342). NB: this is where process and content meet: members reproduce the memes provided by the firm and the enacted memes produce the culture which is the environment for the members to base their beliefs on about ‘how things are done around here’. The culture is now also the basis for the development of memes; the content has become process. ‘.. the presence of managerially assigned monetary incentives and career progression that motivate the display of adherence to corporate memes; and, not least, the power of leaders to sanction and select out actors who do not abide by corporate values’ (p 1342).

Selection and Variation

Firms offer two sorts of selection and variation advantages to memes: 1) they offer a context that places memes that are potentially beneficial to the firm in closer proximity to one another than is typical in markets (complementary ideas, groups socially evolving norms) and 2) the presence of professional management who motivated and responsible for the creating and enforcement of memes considered beneficial. ‘.. firms have an advantage over markets as superior explorers of design space and thus are beter able to create variation through novel recombinations of memes’ (p 1344).

DBC Pierre – Lights Out in Wonderland

This is a selection of some quotes of said author in the above novel. I found this to be useful for the development of my theory on the firm. Importantly in the novel some aspects are pointed out concerning the new relation between individual people and firms. Note that these are quotes from a novel: these can be useful in general and in this case (firm theory) in specific, because some novels have the capacity to shed light on new stuff.

Yes it’s over: profit won the game, but like an infection, killed its host. We were the host. Quality died out because we relinquished the right to filter our own choices; profit became the filter of all choice. Truth died out because we no longer filter true experience; media profit became the filter. The infection found every human receptor, bound to every protein of existence, sucking them dry to feed corporate tumours immunised against us by government. Now the host is a carcass, the market a bacterial enzyme. So adieu!’ [DBC Pierre Lights out in Wonderland fn p. 5]

Ah Customer Service. It falls to Dalí girl to work the gulf between a photograph of a glamour model in a telephone headset and a collections department not based at this address. She squirms because despite efforts to erase her common sense, culture has left a nodule of reason intact. That fragment of tumour makes her uncomfortable enforcing outrageous terms. Her employer should have picked up on that’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland fn p. 8]

David West is an origami person.* Spread, creased, and folded by culture into a clever likeness of a man, a napkin adornment without ideas beyond his own folds, unfolding others to crease then back in his own image’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out In Wonderland p. 15]

Free-market economics is an antiquated, smutty and careless box of tricks whose whimsical main flaw is clear even to a child. Still look how many adults fall breathless with lust to its promise – even though they must abandon empathy and moral judgment to embrace it. Their dirty secret puts all their intelligence to work throwing dust in the air around one glaring truth: that without trickery or eroding value, without extortion, manipulation, deceit or outright theft – profit will simply not perpetually grow’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland fn p. 20].

Remember this: there are no receptors left for cleverness in the public domain. You need never be more than slightly clever or slightly nice. Anything more will arouse suspicion and rage, and confound the software that runs the country. This is because society’s mechanisms are calibrated for stupidity and indolence – and not to be that way is now, by definition, anti-social’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p. 29].

Stupid nature, which the church led us to admire as a perfect system, has crippled us as it cripples and kills everything through shoddy design’[DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland pp. 31-2].

Capitalism is a limbo. Not a structure but an anti-structure. Driven not towards a defined end, but hovering over a permanent present, harvesting a flow of helpless human impulses. It builds no safe futures, leaves no great structures, prepares no one for roads ahead. And why would it? We don’t march through an age of civilization, but float between Windows and Mac, treading water’[DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p. 36]

The head of a pharmaceutical company admitted that only thirty percent of drugs work properly on thirty percent of people. And if you observe life you’ll see that he merely identifies the mean threshold of human success in nature. The drug company was a working model of the mathematics of expectation, endeavour, whim and fortune. Therefore abolish the notion of one-hundred-per-cent solutions to touted by culture. According to nature, thirty percent is a windfall’[DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland pp. 43].

And if it was profitable it must be true´ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p. 64].

.. and highlights are the pixels of a life. We’re all witnesses together of the jumping fish, nobody else in the world is. The same pixel is added to each of our lives, ..’[DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p 79]

It has done this thinking that I am a food writer’ [DBC Pierre Lights Out in Wonderland p 104].

Volgens Ten Bos is Bureaucratie (als een) Inktvis

This is a summary of Ten Bos’s book: ‘Bureacratie is een Inktvis’. The concept of a hyperobject is valuable and was extensively used in my book about the firm.

Characteristics of a bureaucracy are: 1) they have viscosity 2) they are not confined to some location 3) they exist in different time dimensions 4) they are only discernible in phases 5) they are interobjective.

1) viscosity people dealing with bureacracies know these ethical stances: a) groups not individuals are the source of true creativity b) to belong is not a wish but a moral law to which an individual must comply c) to become subject to rationality and science of the collective leads to individual and collective benefit. This ethik is omnipresent in bureaucracies: bureacratic memes.

This is the system by which the business firms are directed and controlled via rules, responsibilities for decisions and their procedures. It also involves the way the company objectives are set, the means of attaining them and the monitoring of them. The focus here is on the relation between the shareholders and the management. Institutions can be seen as bodies of rules forming the environment of markets and organizations where trade-offs take place. The nature of these environments can for instance be economic, political, social, cultural and institutional. The environment provides the conditions for the creation of both coordination mechanisms, for shaping them and providing selection mechanisms evolving both. The environment of organizations and markets consists of rules shaping human interaction safeguarding transactions from any risk explicit to them. In this sense ’the way the game is played’ is shaped by the cultural institutional environment, which itself is a result of cultural evolution. It is suggested here that this myriad detailed routines, rules and attitudes evolve via human communication from person to person. And in that way that they are capable to generate a finite yet large variation of tentative and experimental beliefs and corresponding decisions and actions for people to exhibit in their professional and private lives alike.

The average counts: to not spend money is good but keeps the collective poor and to spend is sinful but benefits the collective. In that sense mediocracy is a good thing because it benefits the collective and excelling as an invidual damages the collective. As a consequence average performance is beneficial: too much or too big or too deep can never be a good thing. And this hangs in the balance: to not act so as to maximize some things (be a brilliant individual) yet to act so as to maximize other things (consume). Traditional theory of bureaucray states that the person and the position are separate entitities, but starting from the hyperobject theory it becomes clear that this is not possible and bureacracy exists in all of people’s daily activities. The appropriate term for this phenomena is ‘institutionalism’: what is ‘done’and ‘not done’ is institutional and to go against the grain is unprofessional or dilettante behavior. The prototypic and unreliable illustration: monkies associate cold water with some action and institutionalize their action. In this sense people become neophobic: people are very hesitant to engage in something new. Everyone is responsible and no one is accountable; good or bad are annihiliated because everything is proceduralized and everybody is responsible. ‘Nobody really washes her hands clean but everybody washes them together’ [Ten Bos 2015 p. 52].

2) Non locality

In everyday reality we manage to identify objects also using their locality in space and time. In addition we can use speed and acceleration to find out what they are. People are used to observe the world in a three dimensional grid where there a distance between ourselves and other things potentially as well as a difference in speed and acceleration. This is useful for our daily survival but it is also a construct whereby people become separated from their environment, while in fact they are an integrated part of it [Ten Bos 2015 pp 53-4]. Instead of distinguishing people as entities isolated from others and from their environment (the wish to communicate something is the cause of the communication and that the subject is separated from her communication), a better alternative is to understand that individuals are not discrete elements but entangled and very hard to distinguish. This is relevant for people dealing with bureaucracies (bureaucrats) also: the person, her position, the context have become so entangled that they are impossible to distinguish, cause and effect have become indistinguishable. As a conseqence people can act very differently in different locations and at different times: they are driven by outside forces alone and no internal forces. In bureaucratic reality cause and effect have become separate: the process becomes indeterminate. Everything touches everything else, everything is connected: it is an endless sequence of paper, conversation, decision and idea. In that sense bureaucracy is also the denial of singularity and while everbody affects eeverybody else, they are at a distance from each other.

3) Waves

When dealing with hyperobjects the observer has no control over the situation. Bureacracy is the water in which we swim; we don’t know much about it and what we are doing really is survive. This must be clear: this water is often a subtle and often a not quite so subtle form of violence. This violence leads us to the execution of a lot unnecessary work of the kind ‘bulllshit jobs’ [Graeber in Ten Bos 2015 p 59]. People dealing with bureaucracies often do not understand this environment or their positions in it because there is no perspective for their actions. Whatever is written does not conform to what is spoken or what is thought and in a bureaucracy nobody is authentic and everybody is to some extent stupid. This condition of stupidity is relevant in this era of late capitalism.

The pivot is shifting from a correct execution of the tasks belonging to the position, to the correct handling of the administrative tasks that come with the job. ‘This resembles the image of a large ferry boat that, nearly out of control, drives through a sea of drowning people’[ Peter Sloterdijk 1995 pp 13-4 in Ten Bos 2015 p 61]. The expression of emotion does not help, because it is not seen as solidarity and also because to express emotions something concrete to react to is needed. And so as a consequence people tend to feel small in relation to these processes within hyperobjects. The reactions of people between themselves (for example evaluations) are filtered and temporized in relation to their context and so people dealing with hyperobjects tend to be unsure of their performance.

4) Phases

A hyperobject cannot be seen in its entirety but only in parts or in time, as phases. To see it as one the observer would have to ascend to a higher dimension but our senses are limited to the dimensions of the reality they are in. Hyperobjects can appear to not exist for some time but then jump back into view at some point. Hyperobjects are permanently active and never stagnate. Nobody is in control of these processes including the bureaucrats themselves. There is no master mind steering these processes, the machine runs by itself, there is no higher authority. And conversely those considered to be in charge are not effectively in control or to a limited extent. Power is not centralized and can be dispersed in the organization or can even be located at the floor. Often the management has limited power and can not say much for risk of having to execute whatever they have expressed: they also feel observed and controlled. Though hyperobjects are at some times more present or noticeable than at other times, they have a tendency to force themselves to grab the attention. An important characteristic of bureaucracies is testing: once tested, certified or accredited – all procedures to conform to some standard – doors are opnede that were closed before.

This is an automatic absolvent for reflexivity: having entered some test it is no longer required to think about the essence of the thing put to the test, but about the essence of the test itself. People believe that to summarize some tested element by highlighting some issues and ignoring others implies to really understand and to know the element and to identify its causes in an attempt to improve the global performance of some system by tuning the micro-mechanisms. The thought behind this system is to represent reality in the simplest way and to then organize it. And yet, audits and tests are on many occasions no more than an opinion of the person designing the test. And as a consequence the acceptability of the test result depends on the trust that the testee has in the tester. And as a result the selection procedure of the most trustworthy testing agency and not discussion of the facts becomes the main issue for the test. The selection of the testing facility and the testing procedure itself have become the authority for trustworthiness.

The test now provides the certainty much sought after: having achieved the required score the testee feels she can rest assured. But two elements remain unsettling: has the test unveiled facts about the the truth or the testee: what is now known that wasn’t known before the test? And for how long does this last, namely when is the next test due? And so central to the hyperobject is a feeling of stupidity in the individual caused by the object, the bureaucracy in particular. Whenever testing, a bureaucracy looks in a literal way, not at her, but right through the individual in that sense causing a feeling of being stupid and clumsy in the given situation. The proffered support isn’t necessarily useful or helpful and this cannot be known in advance; it is known in advance however that the amount of offered support increases over time.

5) Interobjectivity

The essence is that people can use instruments and means and machines to leave marks that will last for weeks and months and years. These marks are symbols of power: whatever their concrete meaning is, they have the intention to state something and to hold someone to the statement. When the statement isn’t understood then the receiver of the mark pretends that she does understand. Kafka has understood that bureaucracy can be a comedy where everybody pretends to understand what everyone else says and does either or not intentionally. Bureaucracy cannot work if the people are dumb and cannot understand what the written texts say. People need to be enlightened to just the righ level so as to be capable to understand what the bureaucracy requires.

Bureaucracy requires the existence of the tools to register and administrate. The marks of power must remain in existence for some time and the ‘continuity of ink’ supports this. Importantly the objects that surround and pervade bureaucracies also shape the decisions and the communication. These are infrastructural conditions and restrictions that are made available or imposed by the objects that surround people populating bureaucracies.

Individuals exist between private person, her autonomous self, and the official person, her function in a hierarchy, servicing herself as well as the bureaucracy, namely the system that is her environment. ‘This perspective on people as employees sheds light on the concept of hyperobjects also. At this point we begin to understand how the hyperobject not only encompasses people but pervades them’ [Ten Bos 2015 p 112]. The confusion is how people’s wishes to live a normal life as an autonomous human being can be satisfied within the confines of the hyperobject, as often suggested by the human resources manager.

Sculptor’s Testament by Rodin

AUGUSTE RODIN
Nov 12, 1840 – Nov 17, 1917
SCULPTOR’S TESTAMENT TO THE YOUNG ARTISTS
(As translated by Paul Schnell)

You young people about to make yourselves beauty’s servants, perhaps it will please you to find here, a résumé of much experience.

Love with devotion the master that preceded you. Bow to Phidias and Michelangelo. Admire the divine gaiety in the one and the savage melancholy in the other. Admiration is the wine of the noble spirit. But guard against imitating your predecessors.While paying attention to the delivery, you must understand the essence of what is eternally fruitful, namely the love of nature and truthfulness. These are the two great passions of all geniuses. All have loved nature without compromise. Acquiring this knowledge will help you avoid affectations. Tradition recommends that you consult with reality and forbids all blind following of any master. Nature is your only goddess, believe in her without reservation and be convinced that she is never ugly, nor will she ever inhibit your ambition to serve her. All is beautiful to the artist, his penetrating gaze discovers the true character of all things and all beings, that is to say, the inner truth that shines through the form and this truth is beauty—and you will meet up with this truth—-work persistently.

You sculptors
, strengthen your sense of spacial depth. The intellect finds it difficult to deal with this concept and stays preoccupied with that which represents the surface. To think of the form in terms of material density is hard, but it is your task. Establish clearly, above all, in the figures you are shaping, the total layout. Emphasize strongly the postures. Every part of the body, head, shoulders, hips and bones declares itself to you. Art demands certainty, only withcertainty of stated lines are you diving into space and taking possession of it. When your composition of the large and whole is firmly in place, you are home free, as your figures are already living. All the rest seems to comply with the whole and details appear to materialize as if by themselves. (‘Quand vos plans sont arrêtés, tout est trouvé. Votre statue vit déjà. Les détails naissent et ils se disposent ensuite d’eux-mêmes’). So when you sculpt, do not think in terms of surface, but rather in terms of space. Let your intellect perceive of every plane as if a mass, where its final appearance is struggling to escape its background. Imagine having it grow upon you by itself. All life emanates from a center, wherefrom it sprouts and spreads from the inside out. It is in this manner that one feels in all good sculpture, a powerful inner strength, that is the secret in ancient art.

You painters,
observe in reality, depth extensions (perspective), the third dimension and look at a painting by Rafael and see how this master, when showing a frontal view of awoman, he lets the breast recede at a slant and thereby creates the illusion of the third dimension. All great painters work spatially. In their knowledge of the spatial lies their strength. Think about the fact that mass, rather than line, tells the story. When you sketch, do not worry about the outlines, but only that which is bodily, the bodily determines the outline. Practice without let up, devote yourself completely to the work. Art is nothing but feeling, but if you don’t know about mass, proportions, color and lack dexterity of hand, all living feeling is for naught. What indeed would become of even the greatest poet in a foreign land, whose language he did not know. Unfortunately, in thenew generation of artists, one finds poets not wanting to learn to speak, which is the reason they can only stutter. Be patient, do not believe in the value of impulse, it does not exist. An artist’s most noble virtues are reflection, care, honesty and willpower. Create your work with straightforward workers. Be truthful, you young people, I don’t mean for you to be exact in a boring way, such as that found in photography and castings. Art begins first and foremost from the inner truth. All your shapes, all your colors, must express feeling. The artist who is content with a superficial likeness and who slavishly reproduces worthless details, will never become a master. When visiting an Italian Campo Santo, you have no doubt seen the childish manner with which the artists entrusted with decorating the graves, busy themselves reproducing literally all garment embroidery, lace and braids worn by the statues. I suppose you can call them exact, but they are not the truth, because they do not point to the soul. Almost all sculpture remind us of Italian cemeteries or the memorials in our public places, where one sees only capes, tables, chairs, machines, balloons and telegraphs. No inner truth, therefore no art. Abhor this kind of rubbish, be truth-loving to the extreme. Do not ever hesitate to express what you feel, despite stepping in opposition to commonly accepted concepts, you may not be understood at first, but fear not being lonely, soon friends will follow you. That which is the deepest truth for one human being, is the same for all. Make no grimaces, no fancy twisting to attract the public. Simplicity and naturalness, the fairest is right before your eyes. Those people you know the best, my very dear and great friend Eugene Carriere, who departed us so early in life, knew in his painterly rendition of his wife and child, that he only had to glorify the maternal love to be exalted.

Masters are those who observe with their own eyes, what the world has seen and by perceiving the beauty in all things—too simple for others to catch sight of. Accept the criticism, you will understand it easily—it is what will make you sure of yourself when torn by doubt. Be not confused by criticism that does not affect your conscience. Fear not unjust criticism—it will upset your friends and force them to reflect on the love they bear you and realize the foundation on which it rests, making them, as a result, more determined to stand by your side. When your talent is at an early stage of development, you will begin to acquire just a few followers, and on the other hand, quite a few enemies. Do not lose courage, the first group will be victorious, because they know why they love you—the others do not know why they hate you. The first is passionately involved with the truth and constantly supplying you with new followers. The others show no durable eagerness for their false opinions—the first is tough, the other go as the wind blows, the truth wins inevitably. Do not waste your time with social or political connections. You will come to see many of your contemporaries, with the help of intrigue, gain fortune and fame, they are not truthful artists. Some of them, in the meantime, are quite worldly clever and if you allow yourself to tangle with them on their territory, you will waste all your life’s energies on this and not have a minute left over for your art. Love with devotion and passion your artistic calling, there is nothing more beautiful. It is more sublime than the common man suspects.

The artist provides a grand example, he loves his work, his pay is the joy he receives from work well done. The world will become a worthwhile place, when all the people in it, have the souls of artists, that is to say, when all enjoy their life’s work. Art is also a wonderful guide to sincerity. The true artist always expresses what he thinks, at the risk of offending all existing prejudices.

The Meme Machine

The Meme Machine – Susan Blackmore

 

My introduction

To cut a long story short – don’t worry I will summarize in some detail the train of thought hereafter anyway, because I am not going to get away with it just like that and you will miss nothing – Blackmore suggests to annihilate Dawkins’ hope for the human condition and Dennetts expectations (however small) about it: we cannot rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators (the gene), because there is no one to rebel. And it is exactly this realisation, according to Blackmore, that allows us to live a truly free life. Wow.

We humans in her view are susceptible to the thought that we are capable of thinking, hoping and expecting, but in fact she suggests we are ‘meme machines’. These thoughts above are memes themselves. Humans are biological computing machines, fit to run any utterable program. The programs fight or negotiate between themselves, in our heads, for attention. They may or may not be favourable to us humans, their hosts, where they live.

It is them, the memes, that live in our minds. And it is them that make us think we think, memorize, expect, and hope. We believe we do these things. But we don’t, not really. In other words: humans are susceptible to invasions of ideas and concepts that shape their thought and, henceforth, their actions. These memes have their own intention to survive. Like all natural processes they are ‘stupid’ processes, they don’t have a ‘will’, they just survive.

Let’s call large complexes of integrated and complex sets of memes, their subsets and their interrelations memeplexes. Then culture is an ‘ensemble’ of memeplexes, say related to work ethics, cooking habits, dinner etiquette, religions and their interrelations, economic behaviour, traffic regulations and customs and so on and so forth. In this world, humans are the computing machine that culture runs on. Cultural elements called memes are struggling to survive on a human substrate.

And conversely: if a human being actively enters any such cultural environment, by upbringing, by local or social circumstances, or for personal reasons or a profession, the memes in vigor in that environment at that time will have an influence on the thoughts of that individual. And consequently on his or her actions and behaviour, and lastly, on her or his own utterances, thus propagating the culture in his environment.

The linking pin between this train of thought and my research subject is that people, when dealing with a company or in fact any organisation, willingly give up some of their autonomy to have their behaviour increasingly steered by the culture in vigor in this (new) environment: by the ruling memes. In many cases company culture shows some traits resembling religious belief and in some cases to work at a company requires a faith bordering the religious. When defining company behaviour, I suggest that the leading principle be therefore not defined by the specific details of the people and processes it encompasses, but by the ‘ensemble’ of cultural elements that shapes it and defines its corporal behaviour. That is: behaviour that is autonomous and in a sense independent of the behaviour of the constituent human beings that are merely the computer that the company runs on.

The central thesis of my research project is this: companies are behavioural patterns in space and time steered by memes, through which material, people and information flow. Verder lezen The Meme Machine

The Trouble With Harry

harry2Harry is characterized by the trouble he causes others dealing with him, in vein with Hitchcock’s 1955 film. However, where the movie character is deceased, in the story below he is much alive and kicking. Now try this: (loosely) replace Harry below with some other protagonist of your choice kicking up trouble, like ‘my local bank’, ‘soccer league’ or … Enjoy it!

Harry in general works poorly or not at all. He grows 5-6% each year and as he does, he tends to encroach (make you do stuff), redistributing human effort into different forms. He either works by himself or not at all and if he doesn’t, you can’t make him – forcing doesn’t help. Should he work, leave him alone and don’t change anything.

A new Harry generates new problems, so do without him if possible. If you can’t, then keep him as small as possible. If designed from scratch for a complex task, he will never work and cannot be made to work. You then need to start over, beginning with a simple design. If made by expanding the dimensions of a smaller version, he will not behave like the smaller version. You need to start over also. Plan to scrap the first version, you will anyway.

He develops his own goals the instant he comes into being and follows those unscrupulously, regardless of any need or of changed conditions. He can’t be fully known and is his own best explanation. Harry is capable of failing in an infinite number of ways and will be operating in failure mode most of the time. Growing in size and complexity, new functions appear suddenly in a stepwise fashion as he loses basic functions.

Harry typically displays unexpected ‘prima donna’ behavior: he kicks back, gets in the way and tends to oppose his own functions. Now fully prepared for the past, he tends to malfunction conspicuously just after his greatest triumph. Temporary patches meant to improve will become permanent and former versions continue to haunt later ones. Internal operations define his functions and the larger he is, the less is the variety offered. If large, he is capable of bringing about errors of mind-boggling proportions.

He tends to attract Harry-kind-of-people. People ‘in his circles’ do not do what he says they are doing. His interface with individuals tends to be narrow anyway. To be fair: he himself is not exactly doing what he says he is doing. So the names of things are not the thing itself: they are what they are reported to be: if Harry says it happened, it happened.

Information from outside his inner circle tends to decrease and ‘home grown information’ increases for individuals in it: the outside fades and becomes less important. The meaning of communication with Harry is: feedback hasn’t fed back, until he changes his course. If he ignores it, he has begun the process of terminal instability.

In order to remain unchanged, he must change and that is The Trouble With Harry.

De Piloten van Luyendijk

Deze post is een reactie op het recente en waardevolle boek van Joris Luyendijk: Dit Kan Niet Waar Zijn. Luyendijk analyseert als ’tot antropoloog opgeleide journalist’ en zonder kennis van financiële markten, het gedrag van mensen in hun professionele habitat: de financiële sector in Londen. Zijn eerste interview vraag is ongeveer deze: ‘hoe kun jij met jezelf leven na wat je de mensheid hebt aangedaan in de crisis van 2008?’. Zijn beeld na circa twee jaar onderzoek en 200 interviews is: een vliegtuig met problemen en een lege cockpit. Met de kennis die ik tot nu toe heb verzameld over complexe adaptieve systemen ga ik op zoek naar de missende piloten van Luyendijk. Verder lezen De Piloten van Luyendijk

Lane en Maxfield over Strategie in Complexe omstandigheden

Deze post gaat over strategieontwikkeling in complexe omstandigheden en is grotendeels gebaseerd op het artikel van David Lane en Robert Maxfield getiteld ‘Foresight, Complexity and Strategy’, 1996, opgenomen in SFI Proceedings: ‘The Economy as an Evolving Complex System’. Verder lezen Lane en Maxfield over Strategie in Complexe omstandigheden

Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations

Eén van de grondleggers van de moderne economie is Adam Smith. Deze schrijver wordt, al dan niet terecht, aangehaald door allerlei schrijvers en ik vind het belangrijk om die bron zelf gelezen te hebben. Deze post is een verslag daarvan. In zijn boek ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations‘ beschrijft hij de dynamica van economieën en handel. Dat is onder andere waardevol omdat hij teruggaat naar elementaire begrippen en essentiële mechanismes zoals het ontstaan van transacties, de verdeling van werk c.q. specialisatie, prijsvorming, en soorten economische agenten en hun drijfveren. De theorieën zijn goed onderbouwd, met voorbeelden en becijferingen doorspekt en aan de toenmalige realiteit gekoppeld. Verder lezen Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations

Hive Mind

In elk bedrijf bestaat de neiging de activiteiten uit te breiden met nieuwe mogelijkheden om die bij voldoende belang in de gelederen op te nemen of iets bestaands af te stoten. Hetzelfde geldt voor het onderzoeken van werkwijzen om de huidige status-quo eventueel in te ruilen voor of aan te passen tot een verbeterde versie. Tegelijkertijd heeft een onderneming de neiging om bij haar ‘leest’ te blijven en om het huidige arsenaal aan activiteiten intact te houden en de bestaande werkwijze te behouden. Mijn vermoeden is (zie ook mijn eerdere posts) dat er één of andere balans is tussen die twee neigingen. Of is het: er moét een belans zijn om succesvol te zijn als bedrijf? In deze post 2 van 7 in deze conversatie zoek ik uit wat die samenbindende factor is die maakt dat bedrijven als zodanig in stand blijven. Verder lezen Hive Mind