Geoffrey Hodgson on How Evolutionary Social Science Can Evolve – Talk and Q&A

In this talk and a Q&A session open to the global audience, Professor Geoffrey Hodgson (Loughborough University, UK) reflects on the future of the evolutionary theory in social sciences. When it was published in 1982, “An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change”, by Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, made a big impact, particularly in management and in innovation studies. But despite their (unacknowledged) use of the Darwinian principles of selection, variation and replication in that seminal work, there is an enduring reluctance among evolutionary economists to acknowledge their Darwinian source or to develop these concepts further. Instead, researchers in this area have fallen back on the vague term “evolution”, as if it had a single, precise and widely shared meaning.

A key ambiguity is whether it refers to one entity or a population of multiple entities. There is no precise meaning of “evolution” and attempts to invest it with one have understandably failed. In the absence of an over-arching theory, some practitioners of “evolutionary economics” have even downplayed the principle of selection, which was there at the start. This event is part of the series of talks on Strategy, Organization, and Complexity hosted by Cranfield University and moderated by Professor Andrey Pavlov and Dr Ibrat Djabbarov.

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