An evolutionary program for business history?

Enterprise and Society

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 498-506

  Winter, Sidney G ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84883036237     PISSN: 14672227     EISSN: 14672235     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/es/kht055     Document Type: Note

References (19)

1. Sidney Winter, "Capabilities: Their Origins and Ancestry," Journal of Management Studies 49, no. 8 (2012): 1402-6.
2. This sketch complements Raff's own characterizations of my work with Nelson, attending more to the background of premises and motivations that we share with a large number of colleagues who pursue the evolutionary vision in economics. Implicitly, it presents fundamental contrasts to mainstream thinking in the discipline.
3. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed., New York: Macmillan, 1.
4. Thorstein Veblen, "Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 12, no. 3 (1898): 373-97.
5. Daniel Kahnemann, Thinking, Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, esp. ch.19.
6. Daniel Raff, "How to Do Things," Enterprise & Society 14, no. 3: : 435-66, quote from 459.
7. James M. Utterback and William J. Abernathy, "A Dynamic Model of Process and Product Innovation," Omega 3, no. 6 (1975): 639-56.
8. My own work has included participation in modeling efforts directed to some of these issues. The computer industry study initially presented in Franco Malerba, Richard Nelson, Luigi Orsenigo, and Sidney Winter, "History- Friendly Models of Industry Evolution:
9. The Computer Industry," Industrial and Corporate Change 8, no. 1 (1999): 1-36.
10. will appear in revised form as a chapter in Franco Malerba, Richard Nelson, Luigi Orsenigo, and Sidney G. Winter, Innovation and the Evolution of Industries: History Friendly Models, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
11. The "History Friendly" work is particularly relevant here because it includes exploration of the counter-factual history of a real phenomenon-which is much less problematic in a simulation model than for the real thing.
12. On entrepreneurial choices about vertical scope and financing, see Michael G. Jacobides and Sidney G. Winter, "Entrepreneurship and Firm Boundaries: The Theory of A Firm," Journal of Management Studies 44 (2007): 1213-41.
13. Raff, "How to Do Things," 450.
14. For more extensive discussion of this point, see Michael G. Jacobides and Sidney G. Winter, "Capabilities: Structure Agency and Evolution," Organization Science 23 (2012): 1365-81, sec. 4.1.
15. As is slyly remarked there, "The problem with formal rationality is that it ignores some very powerful incentives that operate in firms and sectors" (1373).
16. see Mary Tripsas and Giovanni Gavetti, "Capabilities, Cognition, and Inertia: Evidence from Digital Imaging," Strategic Management Journal 21, no. 10 (2000): 1147-61.
17. That instrumental relation is very much part of what Nelson and I had in mind. See our discussion of the third of our three questions directed to the "contemporary orthodoxy" of production sets: "How does the knowledge possessed by one firm relate to that of others and to the knowledge environment generally?"
18. (Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, 64-65.).
19. Raff, "How to Do Things," 436.