The Emergence of Organizations
and Markets:
Theory Overview
John F. Padgett
conference on book at
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies
June 30, 2015
Goals of book
To rethink from social science perspective:
• Novelty
especially organizational novelty
(a.k.a. “emergence of actors”)
• Evolution
not of genes or pseudo genes (“memes”)
but of networks
P.S. Evo-devo is parallel move in biology to
make evolution more “networky”
Two core theoretical concepts
• Autocatalysis
(from Walter Fontana at Santa Fe Institute)
• Multiple Networks
(from Harrison White at Harvard Sociology)
My own objectives for workshop
• How to develop further the organizational
novelty/network evolution research agenda?
-- potential follow-up venue: new SSRC
working group on History and Evolution
• How to fill in remaining theoretical gaps
between autocatalysis and multiple networks?
• More empirical applications?
Autocatalysis
• Constructivist networks of transformation/action
-- not the usual “networks as pipes” of
mere transmission
• That reproduce themselves through time,
via cycles in topology
-- metaphors of body and nose
Autocatalysis (cont.)
• Eigen and Schuster originally applied autocatalysis
to chemical origins of life,
• but we add that their chemical definition of
“Life” also applies to
• Economy
where products are produced and transformed
• Social networks
where people are produced and transformed
• Language
where symbols are produced and transformed
Three types of Autocatalysis
• Production autocatalysis
-- products produced; skills reproduced
-- appears in book mostly as models
• Biographical autocatalysis
-- skills produced; relational protocols reprod.
-- appears in book mostly as cases
• Linguistic autocatalysis
-- conversations produced; symbols reprod.
-- appears in book mostly as promissory note
Multiple Networks
• Autocatalysis is self-organization/emergence:
in effect, network version of “selection”
-- in biologists’ sense of relative reproduction
-- not economists’ sense of relative efficiency
• That alone not evolution, because no generation
of variation/novelty
• Our theory (really our cases) argue that org.
novelty comes from transpositions and
recombinations of multiple social networks
Multiple Networks (cont.)
• Nice finding in chapter 3 modeling was endogenous
emergence of multiple networks
-- Durkheim’s “differentiation of domains”
-- first model (I know) to do so
• Each domain is autocatalytic, but multiple domains
function to regulate and to catalyze each other,
through shared parts/people
-- “regulate” means negative feedback between
domains, to smooth perturbations
-- “tipping” or “spillover” means positive feedback
between domains, to induce new
autocatalytic cycles
Innovation versus Invention
• Innovation is vertical movement in figure 1
-- through multi-functional nodes and short chains
-- social embeddedness “topology of possible”
-- innovation per se quite common, but mostly
eliminated by autocatalytic reproduction
• Invention is horizontal spillover in figure 1
-- not like new product but like new industry
• “Revolution” is cascade into more than one domain
-- like formation of new multi-functional elite
• [Woody will say more]
Outstanding issues/Next steps
• No time for me to discuss, but I sent around:
(1) Resilience/structural vulnerability
(2) Syncretism
(3) Modularity
(4) Micro mechanisms of network
recombination
(5) Biography