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A theory of the cultural evolution of the firm: the intra-organizational ecology of memes
Organization Studies, Oct, 2003 by John Weeks, Charles Galunic
To put it another way, cultures are socially distributed, and typically unevenly so. As the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1992) puts it, cultures are social distributions of modes of thought and forms of expression. This complicates the study of culture in two ways that must be reflected in a theory of the firm. First, we need to theorize how this social distribution is formed and how it changes over time. That is, we need to be able to explain the ecology of ideas, beliefs, know-how and other modes of thought and their expression as patterns of behavior and language and symbolic artifacts. How do these elements spread and take hold? Why do some persist and others fade away? We need a theory of the ecology of these cultural elements. Second, we must also explain how these elements of culture change as they spread across different parts of the firm and are reinterpreted, recontextualized and recombined. Lastly, building on the work already done within the knowledge-based view on the issue of complementarities, we must conceptualize the flow of culture across firm boundaries. Firms are not cultural islands, and we need to understand how new ideas and new ways of talking and behaving and thinking enter the firm and to understand the impact that they have on the existing culture. These are the required elements of a cultural theory of the firm that is fully evolutionary.
There is a second complication. Because culture is socially distributed, it is useful and necessary to consider the careers of cultural elements. Following the conventions of studies of cultural evolution, we use the term 'memes', first coined by Richard Dawkins (1989: 192), to refer collectively to cultural modes of thought: values, beliefs, assumptions, know-how, and so on. Culture results from the expression of memes, their enactment in patterns of behavior and language and so forth. In adopting such an analytical approach and focusing on particular elements of culture, however, we must not lose sight of the importance of systemic and holistic perspectives on culture. Neither culture nor knowledge divides itself neatly into independent units for our convenience. The meaning and effect of any element of culture depends less on its essence than on the context of the rest of the culture around it. We cannot look at memes in isolation. When conceptualizing how culture evolves through a process of the variation, selection, and retention of memes, we must explicitly take into account the fact that memes only make sense when we look at their patterns of combination.
From this discussion of the advances that the knowledge-based view of the firm has made by increasing our understanding of why we have firms and how best to conceptualize them, we can see an agenda for a new theory of the firm that sheds some of the remaining limitations of the knowledge-based view in order to achieve its aims. The theory must address not just knowledge, but culture as a whole. It must be evolutionary to explain the dynamics of how firms as culture change over time. It must not assume that firms necessarily evolve in ways that improve their performance or serve the interests of their individual members. It must explain how the variation, selection, and retention of memes has led to the cultural patterns we recognize as firms.
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