Knowledge Evolution and Societal Transformations: Action Theory to Solve Adaptive Problems

By Jerald Hage and Michael Quinn Patton

Knowledge is more than information but instead the organizing of information into theories and practices that allow us to do things and accomplish goals. The first stage of knowledge creation depended upon creative scientists and entrepreneurs, but the second stage required research laboratories and teams. Now cooperation between organizations is necessary to solve individual, organizational, institutional, and global problems that face us today.

Individuals presently are raised in four kinds of social contexts: traditional, modern, post-modern, and anomic. These contexts explain partisan divides as well as the inability of some to succeed in society. Post-modern contexts produce individuals who are cognitively complex, creative, critical but have empathy towards others. The acceleration in knowledge creation is caused by not only the growth of more post-modern individuals who are creative but organizational innovation and innovative regions. Organizational structures that discourage radical innovations are contrasted with those that facilitate it. Similarly, the histories of three innovative regions--Silicon Valley, Kistra in Sweden, and Hsinchu in Taiwan—are contrasted with the failure of Rt. 128 near Boston.

During the second wave of knowledge creation, social structures were differentiated vertically. Now in the third wave, the differentiation process is horizontal. In the stratification system this means different capitalist classes and work logics rather than social classes with super salaries, thus increasing social inequality. In the study of organizations, this translates into missionary and self-management forms where post-modern individuals obtain meaningful work and ask for customized service. In the study of networks it means the rise of systemic coordinated networks replacing supply chains.

Given the growing inefficiencies of labor markets, product/service markets, and public markets (elections), systemic coordinated networks are proposed as a solution. Furthermore, we need a national corps of individuals with special skills in sectors with shortages who can then be assigned to work in disadvantaged areas. Pre-school, primary school, and secondary school need to be reinvented to facilitate more upward social mobility. Agriculture and industry also require radical new innovations. To build a new civil society, governments have to encourage participation in programs that help others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785273773

Book preview

Knowledge Evolution and Societal Transformations

Knowledge Evolution and Societal Transformations

Action Theory to Solve Adaptive Problems

Jerald Hage

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Jerald Hage 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-375-9 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-375-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Dedication: My Family Tree

My family tree was formed in the mid-1960s when I married Madeleine Cottenet. The family’s evolution has sustained me throughout all these decades. Therefore, I dedicate this book to all the members of this family tree with the hope that it can help my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword: A Magnum Opus for Our Times and the Future by Michael Quinn Patton

Odyssey: Social Capital Acknowledgements in the Intellectual Journey through the Micro, Macro and Meso Worlds of Reality

Chapter One Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Knowledge: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, Knowledge Creators, Structural Change, Adaptive Problems, and Institutional Solutions

Part One Knowledge Creators or Problem Solvers: Creative Minds, Radical Organizational Innovations, and Regional Environments That Encourage Higher Radical Innovation Rates

Chapter Two Knowledge Creators: Individual Creativity

Chapter Three Knowledge Creators: Radical Organizational Innovation

Chapter Four Knowledge Creators: Institutional Environments That Encourage Radical Innovation

Part Two Structural Change: Structural Differentiation and Dedifferentiation in Occupations and Their Classes, Organizations and Their Contexts, Networks and Their Cohesions

Chapter Five Structural Changes in the Stratification System: New Occupations and Kinds of Social Classes

Chapter Six Structural Change in the Organization–Context Nexus: New Organizational Forms and Collaborative Competition

Chapter Seven Structural Change in Network Cohesion Links: New Coordinated Network Systems and Collaborative Social Cohesion

Part Three Adaptive Problems and Institutional Transformations Required to Create Meaningful Work, Employment, and Social Integration

Chapter Eight Knowledge Evolution and Adaptive Problems of the Skill Formation/Research Capability System: Institutional Transformations That Produce New Skills and Reduce Alienation

Chapter Nine Knowledge Evolution and Adaptive Problems of the Economic System: Institutional Transformations to Create Decision-Making Jobs and Reduce Powerlessness

Chapter Ten Knowledge Evolution and Adaptive Problems of the Political System: Institutional Transformations to Create Safety Nets for the Socially Isolated/Mentally Ill and Constructing a New Democracy

Chapter Eleven Everything We Must Do to Further Social Evolution and Institutional Transformations: Solutions, Strategies, and the Stickiness of Path Dependencies

A Future Voyage: The Fourth Stage of Knowledge Creation

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1.1 The Evolution of Science and Technological Research

1.2 Theories Synthesized in the Causes of Innovation and Their Interrelationships

2.1 Macro to Micro to Macro: Opportunities to Learn Two Social Grammars, Postmodern Individuals and Their Styles of Interaction and Societal Change in Behaviors

2.2 The Impact of Rising Levels of Knowledge (Education and Technology) on the Socialization of Children

3.1 Determinants of Radical Innovation

4.1 Diverse Innovative Districts and Multiplier Effect on Organizational Innovation

5.1 Knowledge and Social Classes

6.1 The Evolution of Organizational Inputs: Supply

6.2 The Evolution of Organizational Contexts: Demand

7.1 Diagram of Functional Adaptiveness

7.2 Knowledge and the Rise of Heterogeneous Social Capital

Tables

1.1 Level of Knowledge: Embeddedness

1.2 Four Stages of Knowledge Creation

1.3 The Anatomy of Society: Three Kinds of Social Structures

1.4 Adaptive Problems of Society: Three Institutional Realms

3.1 Measuring Radical Organizational Innovation or Technical Progress

4.1 Dimensions for Describing the Diversity of Innovation Districts: Measures

4.2 Dimensions for Describing the Diversity of National Innovation Systems

6.1 Burns and Stalker’s Two Organizational Forms

6.2 Comparison of Various Schemes for Describing Organizational Forms

6.3 Characteristic of Postmodern Organizations: Variations on the Organic Model

7.1 Resources Needed to Sustain a Society

7.2 Parsons’s AGIL Scheme of Functional Performances: Empirical Measures

7.3 Types of Interorganizational Networks

8.1 State Control over Skill Formation

8.2 Political Economy of Public Education Expenditures, 1875–1965

9.1 Results from the GLSDV Models: Dependent Variable Log Real GNP, 1875–1985

10.1 State Control over Welfare and Health

10.2 The Political Economy of Public Social Welfare Expenditures, 1875–1965

10.3 Total Social Benefits as a Percentage of GDP by Institutional Arrangements (2016)

11.1 Path Dependencies: Obstacles to Institutional Transformations

Action Theory

1.1 One Success Story in Overcoming the Valley of Death

2.1 How Two Social Grammars Aid Individuals of Jewish Origin

2.2 Postmodern Experiences versus Anomic Experiences: Explaining Adaptiveness (Resiliency) to Catastrophes

3.1 Postmodern Entrepreneurship: Social Innovation to Solve Societal Problems

3.2 Restoring Automotive Innovation at GM

6.1 Evolution and Disequilibrium: Conflict

7.1 Evolution and Disequilibrium: Conflict and Lack of Goal Achievement

7.2 Close Encounters and the Internet

8.1 Making One of the Poorest Schools One of the Best—in the World: The Case of Rinkeby in Stockholm, Sweden

9.1 Incubating High-Tech Companies: France

9.2 Saving Retail Chains: Lessons Learned from Best Buy

10.1 Britain’s Program to Reduce Child Poverty

10.2 Kinds of Volunteer Civic Action in Unis-Cité

10.3 Reducing Costs in a Prisoner Rehabilitation Program in Arizona

FOREWORD: A MAGNUM OPUS FOR OUR TIMES AND THE FUTURE

Michael Quinn Patton

This book is a magnum opus that makes sense of the past, explains the present, and lets us peer into the future. Here is an overview of what this magnum opus addresses by unpacking complexities, identifying essences, contrasting conflicting positions, mapping interconnections, and ultimately creating a new whole in the form of an integrated understanding of our postmodern era and its future. The book presents and explains:

• four stages of knowledge creation;

• interconnections among and across micro, meso, and macro arenas of action; and

• how to integrate social science theory, empirical scholarship, policy implications and options, and evaluation research.

The book provides:

• genuine interdisciplinary knowledge integrated across all of the social sciences, breaking down academic silos while identifying crosscutting themes;

• supporting evidence from a full range of social science methods and findings from surveys, in-depth case studies, big data sets, comparative analyses, international and cross-cultural conclusions, and a full range of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed/multiple methods across fields of inquiry; and

• insights generated by triangulating and integrating basic social science knowledge and applied social science findings with social science theory.

The book ensures relevance to problems and solutions by

• attending to both popular and widely disseminated sources and resources as well as less accessible scholarly publications and resources; and

• laying a foundation with the works of great social science pioneers, creating a structural framework with contributions of eminent twentieth-century social scientists, and connecting these classic and enduring breakthroughs in societal understanding with contemporary and leading-edge researchers, theorists, and scholars of the twenty-first century.

To appreciate the dimensions, scale, and significance of this magnum opus, its accomplishments and contributions, consider for a moment how siloed, specialized, fragmented, and polarized institutions are of higher education, public policy, philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, international agencies, and media outlets, to name but a few prominent examples. Our world is filled with trivia, day-to-day sensationalism, celebrity punditry, constant tweets about the mundane, and ever-crescendoing political noise and academic debates all made indecipherable by our short attention spans and vulnerability to selective perception, the confidence heuristic (believing ever more deeply what we hear repeated over and over again), boredom, and compassion fatigue. Great thinking, looking at the big picture, placing knowledge and issues in historical context, and integrating multiple sources, kinds, and bases of knowledge are beyond rare, such thinking is practically unknown in our times.

A magnum opus that integrates more than a half-century of scholarly inquiry, empirical research, social science, theory, and practical applications doesn’t come along every day. When it does, it is worth paying attention. Jerald Hage has produced such a magnum opus. It could not be more timely because he draws on the cumulative knowledge of three centuries of social science to address current challenges and likely future developments. This book, then, is for those who care about making sense of the past and present based on in-depth knowledge, committed scholarship, sophisticated analysis, and astute interpretations, all to inform future possibilities.

The issues addressed are those that will determine the future of humankind: how human beings and societal institutions will deal with global inequality, future economic prosperity, climate change, new technologies, threats to human health, nuclear brinksmanship, ongoing innovation, future knowledge creation, and the host of problems facing humanity together under the umbrella of the Anthropocene.

As an appetizer, or amuse bouche, to give a taste of the wisdom in store for readers, let me offer a few of my favorite insights from the book.

• Despite the attention given by social media (if not by sociologists) to the lack of integration in contemporary societies, the real elephant in the room can be found in failures in adaptiveness or problem-solving occurring at the societal level. He goes on to explain rising levels of societal discontent and all of the related pathologies, including Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists.

• The explosion of studies about social networks has centered on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites, as distinct from various kinds of interorganizational linkages. Therefore, this focus has missed the most interesting transformation that has occurred as a consequence of the third stage of knowledge creation—the construction of systemically coordinated products, services, and research networks that are designed to solve complex problems by means of collaborative cohesion across diverse organizational boundaries.

• Anyone familiar with the complexity of the world knows that any categorization usually, and almost by definition, can be proven partially right and/or partially wrong […] Categorization encourages black and white thinking, rather than fostering a sense of the importance of observing the world in degrees.

• Knowledge growth drives the recognition of new kinds of scientific problems […]

• The greater the task complexity, the more power must be shared. Since knowledge growth drives the complexity of tasks—not just in research but everywhere—even people without postmodern minds will have to learn to share power. He then shows how such sharing can be accomplished, including for solving adaptive problems that are created by knowledge growth.

• Most [sociological] functionalists see no evil, hear no evil, and certainly speak no evil—this is in sharp contrast to the Marxists, who see evil everyone, hear it all the time, and tend to continuously denounce what they see and hear. The truth lies somewhere in between these two postures about society and its future. Paradoxically, a synthesis of this overview is quite simple." He provides that synthesis.

Polymath

We reserve certain labels to distinguish those who can achieve a genuine magnum opus: Renaissance thinker, universalist, polymath. Jerald Hage is far too modest to take on the mantle of such honorifics, but they are well deserved. His own intellectual journey, reported in this book as his Odyssey, makes the case as well as I could, so let me refer the reader to that reflective piece. I’ll simply add the title polymath as a way to think about his worldview in producing this work, the product of more than six decades of study, scholarship, writing, teaching, observation, and theory-building. A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas and is therefore able to draw on complex and diverse bodies of knowledge to solve significant problems. That is an accurate description of the author of this book and why he has been able to construct what is truly a magnum opus for our times and the future.

Michael Quinn Patton is former president of the American Evaluation Association and author of eight major books on program evaluation. Jerald Hage was his doctoral advisor in organizational sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the late 1960s.

ODYSSEY: SOCIAL CAPITAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IN THE INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE MICRO, MACRO, AND MESO WORLDS OF REALITY

Before presenting this punctuated equilibrium theory or PET about knowledge growth and social change, I want to give proper due to all the individuals who have helped me on this intellectual voyage. One of the mantras of contemporary life focuses on the complexity of the world, especially social change processes. My own mantra of an adaptive solution consists of forming diverse (skills, languages, networks, and access to resources—heterogeneous social capital) research teams at each distinctive analytical level. This book and its insights rest on the foundation of multiple diverse teams. Beyond the many interdisciplinary research teams in which I participated, I also want to thank individuals, friends, colleagues, and students who opened doors for me to learn about other countries from particular vantage points and provided special skill sets that I was lacking. Nor should I forget the many funding agencies that were extremely generous to my teammates and myself over the course of my career. Finally, I conclude with a special thanks to my evolving family tree that has sustained me over these past six decades.

This journey began in January 1959 when I was a first-year graduate student at Columbia University. At the time, no courses were offered on the topic of social change. Indeed, as Wilbert Moore (1963) noted in his book, Social Change, the topic had been neglected. I decided at that time to dedicate my professional life to the problem of developing a new theory of social change. But how to do this? I appreciated that the subject matter was too varied for me to comprehend immediately and that I would need to chunk topics into disparate issues and levels of analysis and explore them one at a time. This was at odds with the dominant thinking of the 1960s and remains so even now; the differences between the micro and macro levels are still usually brushed aside. In contrast, I felt that each of these analytical levels had a distinctive reality that could not be reduced to one or the other, despite all the arguments popular at the time (and today) that involve either psychological reductionism/methodological individualism or describe sweeping tides of macro forces that carry everyone along (i.e., a rising tide lifts all boats). With this in mind, I begin with thanking my team members by level and then move on to the others who in various ways have been influential.

Like most individuals interested in theory, I began with a set of predilections or axioms, if you will, about the nature of social reality; I think it worth explicating these right at the beginning given the problem of conformation bias. First, and most critical, was to write a theory, or at least develop some ideas about it, and then test these hypotheses in research. At the time, this represented an intellectual divide at Columbia University characterized by the famous duo of Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton—although both did clearly advocate a preference for testable hypotheses rather than abstract Parsonsian theory built on typologies or empiricism, such as may be found in many Michigan surveys.¹ Second, when I was not sure what theory to follow, especially at the macro level, I believed that a good strategy would be to synthesize existing paradigms to see which one could explain what. This naturally led to the necessity of contingencies. Third, truly testing hypotheses about social change requires collecting comparative data across time, which leads to the recognition of causal processes. How else can social change be measured? Identifying causal process poses some challenges when studying societies that could only be solved in teams with historical expertise. Fourth, the mantra of the complexity of social change involves a rejection of the idea of linear progress and privileges concepts such as disequilibrium, nonlinearity, multiple equations, pathways, and shocks. Obviously, what you look for is what you find.

Micro Level

Some people do not consider the organizational level to be a micro level. I did, following the perspective of economics. My first attack on the problem of social change began with a doctoral dissertation on doctors’ resistance to social change in a hospital. Although it was not a team effort in the strict sense of the term, my research was so generously supported that it allowed me to hire a secretary and a survey firm to conduct three waves of interviews, a situation quite unusual for a graduate student. The interesting problem posed in the project was why any physician would resist an innovative program designed to improve the quality of health care in a community hospital. Essentially, the plan for this program was to borrow the full-time teacher model found in university hospitals and transport it to a community hospital.² The data analysis indicated that support for this program depended on the nature of the physician’s practice, internal medicine versus surgery, and on his or her openness to learning about medical advances. What I learned from this experience was that those who were more interested in learning were less resistant to change.

My first position after a postdoctoral fellowship in the sociology of mental health was an appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. At about this same time, Michael Aiken walked into my office and proposed that we study some health and welfare organizations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; thus, our team was formed. Getting research funds in those days was quite easy for several reasons. Before the explosion in the great society, many federal agencies were concerned about the lack of innovation in local agencies. We obtained a grant from the Vocational and Rehabilitation Administration to study the feasibility of developing new services for individuals who were mentally challenged and for whom other services had previously been funded. We argued that we could predict which organizations would adopt new programs on the basis of the structural characteristics of the organizations, and we proposed a complex research design involving two waves of investigation over a three-year time period. The ideas flowed directly from the axiomatic theory I had written as a graduate student (Hage 1965).³ What remained to be developed were viable measures for each of the concepts in the axiomatic theory. Mike and I worked on this together. The research design was a field experiment in which one organization would approach others with the idea of establishing new programs for the mentally challenged.⁴

In collecting the data, we began making multiple trips to Milwaukee to gain the cooperation of the leaders of the organizations, most of which participated. Mike was superb at gaining access, convincing the CEOs of these organizations to participate and conducting informal interviews with them over lunch. One of the great advantages in conducting panel studies is that one can correct errors made in the previous waves and, at the same time, develop an in-depth understanding of the context—in this case, how the Milwaukee elite operated. During the second stage, we added more variables that measured the extent of communication and the amount of conflict, resulting in an important paper written with our research assistant, Cora Marrett. But more critically, the panel study allowed me to test a basic hypothesis about failed evolution, namely, if a degree of decentralization does not occur when complexity or diversity increases, then what happens? The answer (see Chapter Six) is increased conflict.

The combination of theory and research made it relatively easy to publish papers. In the 1960s, the rejection rates were lower because there were relatively few competitors. The most important paper from my perspective (Hage and Aiken 1967) demonstrated that the values of an organization’s staff did not affect the amount of innovation in new programs and services. This substantiated two of my basic beliefs about sociological reality: (1) individual values do not determine organizational social change, and (2) the individual and the collective levels of reality are not the same. However, I later rethought my positions, and we studied the specific values of those who had power. Robert Dewar, a graduate student, and I explored if the elite’s values as distinct from the leader did have an independent effect on future performance and reported this finding in a paper (1973). This caused me to appreciate a need for more nuance in my intellectual positions. As we collecting data in this research study, I began to write the first draft of Social Change in Complex Organizations (1970).

During this project, Mike and I experienced a moment of serendipity when we discovered the existence of interorganizational relationships. We wrote a theory to explain this in one evening and published a paper, which became my most highly cited article (Aiken and Hage 1968) and eventually led to my meeting Catherine Alter. Chance had opened the door to the meso level, but I did not realize it at the time. During this period, while teaching at Aston University in 1968, to which I had gone to establish links with a major center of organizational research, I wrote the first draft of Techniques and Problems of Theory Construction (published in 1972).⁵ Also, with Koya Azumi, a graduate student friend, we edited a collection of articles on organizations for Harper and Row, which was published the same year.

Given the success of our research on health and welfare organizations, Mike Aiken and I received another project to study different efforts to develop more services for those who were mentally challenged. Because of the leadership of Elliot Richardson, the Department of Health and Human Services wanted to study problems of interorganizational coordination. The project involved contrasting the relative success of five sponsors of services for the mentally challenged, each with a different plan for institutional change. The grant allowed us to support three graduate students. The major takeaway was the difficulty of obtaining cooperation among organizations, given their concerns about autonomy; Coordinating Human Services was published in 1975 with Michal Aiken, Nancy DiTomaso, Robert Dewar, and Gerald Zeitz.

A submicro level involves role-relationships. In the 1960s, I started collaborating with Jerry Marwell, an expert on small groups, to develop a scheme for describing social interaction. My initial starting point was thinking that the hypothesis the greater the frequency of interaction, the more positive the sentiment (Homans 1950) was too simple. Jerry suggested starting with a journalistic question of who-whom, what, where, and when, and cross-classified these categories with variations such as scope, intensity, integration, and independence, generating 16 variables to make this simple hypothesis much more complex with various contingencies (see Marwell and Hage 1970). However, a book that developed a theory about role-relationships was not written until the 1980s, when I teamed up with Chuck Powers. If the resulting book, Post-Industrial Lives (published in 1992), is well written, it is because of his efforts.

Although my main concerns during the mid-1970s had shifted to the collection of data on the macro level, I conducted research on organizations for work at the organizational level. In 1980, I published my major book Theories of Organizations, which was my attempt to provide a critical theoretical synthesis of the major paradigms as I understood them at the time.⁶ Since my concern with the building of theory had always been to make the world a better place to live in, I formed a team with Kurt Finstersbusch, who had much more extensive knowledge about community development than I had, in order to determine how well organizational and community theory could help solve the problems of underdevelopment. With a grant from the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, we analyzed a series of case studies, some of which are reported in Chapter Eleven, on whether the strategy of organizational change could bring about change in the developing world with the book being published in 1987.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, I was contacted by Gretchen Jordan, who worked at Sandia National Laboratories, and this collaboration led to another research partnership in the area of science and technology—one that was quite different from biomedicine. With her funding, I hired Jonathan Mote to help with the research. Jon and I collaborated on studies of Sandia and also of the Institut Pasteur, a transformative organization that produced institutional change; these studies were eventually published (2008 and 2010; also see Chapter Six). Together, we wrote several papers about how to evaluate national systems of innovation. Some of the data collected about Sandia and several other research laboratories, funded by the National Science Foundation, is reported in this book.

Gretchen Jordan connected us with the STAR division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where we developed a long-term relationship and collected three waves of data, again some of which is contained in this book. After Jon left the Center for Innovation, Jeff Lucas helped me try and provide insights about various organizational issues. During these last two decades, I also continued my attempt to help the developing world by assisting in projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other international agencies via the sponsorship of Joseph Valadez, an expert in health evaluations. Because of him, I was able to work in Nicaragua, India, and Uganda.

Macro Level

During my graduate student days, I wrote my first theory, a structural-functional axiomatic theory about societies. To test the theory, I conducted a comparative case-study analysis contrasting the Soviet Union and the United States as two countries with quite different structures (centralized versus decentralized) and opposite sets of functions and dysfunctions. I reported these findings in an introductory sociology course in the General Studies School at Columbia University. In this course, I emphasized the longue durée of at least 100 years. At that time, the teaching of introductory sociology focused on the differences among the institutional realms of society: education, the economy, the polity, health, rehabilitation, and so forth. The course demonstrated that centralization exerted essentially the same impact in each of these realms and that while the concentration of power produced greater growth and efficiency, it was less adaptive, and it had long-term consequences that could allow one to predict the downfall of the Soviet Union.

Although initial efforts to develop ideas about social change started with case studies of the United States versus the Soviet Union—around a general theme about centralization versus decentralization and the related consequences for societal performance—what was needed was a more robust list of social indicators and a theory related to the simpler two case studies that I had previously conducted. In the Techniques and Problems of Theory Construction, I advanced a typology of societal variables or social indicators, to use the vocabulary popular in the 1970s (see Chapter Seven). Again, I used the strategy of cross-classifying the components of society as a system, namely, social resources, social structure, integration processes, social performances, and social outcomes, evaluated by four basic dimensions of knowledges, powers, rewards and rights (the s is important to signify more than one kind).

Studying societies is much more difficult than examining organizations and requires a much longer time horizon. Most critically, the team must have the participation of an historian. Ed Gargan, an expert on France, helped me initiate a joint sociology–history seminar in social change, in which students prepared term papers on a particular problem in one or more societies. Together, we submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation to study Britain, France, Germany, and Italy from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the 1960s. Starting in the 1970s with several grants, we began to collect data on the 28 variables generated by this typology. Ed went to live in Italy; he and an Italian graduate student collected the data on Italy. With a graduate student fluent in German, I went to live in East Germany to work on the Prussian Archives. I also lived in Munich, Germany, and used the state library there. In addition, I spent several summers in the British Museum to collect data on Britain, which I discovered was best disaggregated into the categories of England and Scotland. Bob Hanneman came back from his military service and managed the data bank for me at Wisconsin. When I moved to Maryland, Chip Melvin helped me clean the data and conduct the data analysis while Bob Hanneman helped in the writing of a book, State Responsiveness and State Activism, which was published in 1989, along with several papers (see Chapters Eight and Ten).

In the mid-1970s, J. Rogers Hollingsworth, another historian at Wisconsin, proposed a second macro project on the health care systems of four countries, including collaborating with Olaf Sorenson, an expert on Sweden. The initial idea, which was Rogers’s, was that we examine state versus market coordination of the health care systems of Britain, France, Sweden, and the United States (again, an emphasis on the theme of centralization versus decentralization and its functional consequences). He was primarily responsible for the data on Britain and the United States, while Sorenson provided the data on Sweden and I worked on France. The book, which was published in 1990, won a prize for the best book in comparative public policy (see Chapter Ten). Also, again, Bob Hanneman was a key person in this project and conducted the crucial data analysis.

One lesson I learned from this experience was the importance of knowing a lot of institutional history in each of the sectors of society. So, in the 1980s, while spending some sabbatical time at the University of Indiana to write a book with Chuck Powers, Maurice Garnier and I formed a team to examine the educational sector in the four countries on which I had collected data. He was an expert in the sociology of education; in addition, he could handle the German language in addition to being a native French speaker. Much of this research focused on the role of education and economic growth. Through Garnier’s contacts, we obtained the sponsorship of Antoine Prost, a leading expert on the history of French education, and he was instrumental in helping us obtain financing for our research from the Ministry of Education in France. Also, Maurice had contacts with the Ministry of Planning in France for whom we did a cost-benefit study of technical education in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Together, we published a number of papers and wrote a seminal book for the U.S. Department of Education on the benefits of technical education for economic growth, which, alas, was never published.

Meso Level

As indicated above, my first contact with the meso level was the discovery of interorganizational networks that I encountered while working with Mike Aiken. During the mid-1980s, I picked up this thread again when Catherine Alter, who had come to take a PhD in the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland, asked me if I was interested in a study of systemic coordinated networks in welfare. I was somewhat pessimistic that such networks can be effective, but she told me about her experience working with a number of them in two counties in the Midwestern part of the United States. So, we forged another team, and together we published her dissertation as Organizations Working Together in 1993. Her long-term expertise in coordinating organizations taught me a great deal. Much of that book reflects her research and inspiration; while it is the most widely cited book with which I am associated, she deserves most of the credit. We developed a theory about the evolution of systemic coordinated networks. Again, we tested the hypothesis that failed evolution at the meso level leads to conflict, and we found it to be true (Chapter Seven).

But as I delved into comparative societal analysis, first in studies in health care systems, then on educational systems, I began to appreciate that a critical part of the meso-macro linkage was contained in institutional history, in which one could more easily appreciate alternative pathways. During the late 1990s, J. Rogers Hollingsworth approached me again to develop a theory about the organizational characteristics that lead to radical breakthroughs in biomedical research. He had developed a number of key contacts while doing research in Sweden and realized the potential of a comparative study on this topic. We wrote a research proposal and received funding. Rogers was instrumental in obtaining several grants to move this project forward. He also explored with Hans van Waarden the establishment of a working group at the Netherlands Institute for the Advancement of Science, where I had the opportunity to meet Marius Meeus and Leon Oerlemans. While there, Rogers and I wrote our theory about the interorganizational networks of knowledge production (published in 2000) that lays the foundation for this book (Chapter One). In all of my relationships with these coworkers, the key approach we all took to the meso level was to see it as systemic networks connecting organizations within some institutional context, thus forming links to the macro and micro ones.

Opening Doors, Special Skills, and Research Funding

I have loved history since adolescence. But any theory of change and evolution has to be nourished by more than just reading. It also requires a feeling for other countries, their cultural specificities, which can only come from living in that country. I have been quite fortunate in having a number of people help me learn about other countries. The Aston group invited me to live in Birmingham, England, for two quarters of an academic year in that fateful year of 1968. There, I taught a course in social change and met Lex Donaldson. Grants from the National Science Foundation allowed me to live in London for several summers while collecting macro data on England and Scotland. Then, in 1994, Peter Abel arranged for me to occupy the BP chair at the London School of Economics for several quarters, which provided new insights about the elites of England.

My first introduction to elite schools in France came because a friend, Pierre-Marie Fourt, arranged for me to have a visiting professorship at the Ecole des Mines in 1975–76. While there, I attempted to teach a course about organizations in French; in the process, I developed much more empathy toward the French. Before this appointment, funded by various grants that supported my organizational research, my wife and I had lived in France for a considerable amount of time. In addition, we spend each summer in our home in the south of France, which exposes me to rural thinking. Also, the grants that supported the collection of data during the 1970s and 1990s had allowed me extended periods of time in the French archives, especially those at the Institut Pasteur. Pino Audia, then a student at the University of Maryland, arranged for me to spend several weeks teaching at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, during the 1990s. In addition, he started the shoe industry study.

Both Marius Meeus and Leon Oerlemans invited me to be a visiting professor at their respective Dutch universities, Einhoven (2001) and Tilburg (2004), in the first decade of the twentieth century. These experiences led me to appreciate the Dutch ability to compromise. Marius Meeus and I organized an international conference on innovation, science, and institutional change, with the help of Gretchen Jordan and her contacts at the U.S. Department of Energy, which resulted in a book we edited to be published in 2006.

In Latin America, two former students from the University of Wisconsin arranged for me to do research and consulting in Brazil and Chile. Tarcizo Quinero involved me in a project on EMPBRA, an agricultural research organization. This was one of the most interesting organizations with which I have ever had contact, because it has totally reinvented itself and now represents a model for development via transformational change. In the 1990s, Gonzalo Fallabella invited me to do the same kind of research in Chile, a country that I visited some five times over the course of several decades, including two trips funded by the Fulbright Commission.

For Asia, a combination of friends and students opened doors to Japan, China, and Australia. Koya Asumi arranged for me to come to Japan three times to teach at the International Christian University and to be a Japanese Fellow. Several former Chinese students, including Zhongren Jing and Shengfu Shi, who worked on their dissertations with me, invited me to visit China for three weeks at their expense in 2001. Some of the findings from Jing’s dissertation are included in Chapter Nine. Finally, Lex Donaldson arranged for me to come to Sydney to be a visiting professor at the Australian Business School in 2012.

Three other important skill sets were necessary for the completion of this book. The first and perhaps most critical was the understanding of software programs—not just statistical but also the word- and document-processing aspects. Regardless of how well designed a particular package was, I could find a way of making a mess of it. Bill Hadden patiently solved these problems for me. Especially difficult was assembling the bibliography for this book. His heroic efforts finally accomplished the compiling of this document and meeting the stringent requirements of Anthem Press.

The second important skill was editing. All of my team members will testify to the fact that I do not write well. Rebecca Vollmer did the initial editing. Bill Hadden also reviewed the manuscript and smoothed much of text. While Bill and Rebecca took care of many details, another function that must be performed is standing back and asking the big questions, or at least wondering if these have been posed in the right way. Unexpectedly, a former student of mine, Michael Patton, offered to provide this skill set, and he ably performed this function for me, sending me critical e-mails that gave me considerable food for thought and certainly improved the book. But the most critical task was the end, preparing the book to meet the Anthem style. Bill did much of this work and within a very short time frame that we were provided.

Last but hardly least is the generous support that I have received from numerous funding agencies both here and in Europe. I thank several universities, especially the Universities of Wisconsin and Maryland, for their generous summer support. The American Sociological Association also funded two national conferences, each of which produced a book and allowed me to bring together some very talented people. Both Sandia National Laboratories and the STAR division of the NOAA exposed me to the practical side of applying knowledge. The National Science Foundation has given me seven grants throughout the course of my career and above I have mentioned other government agencies. I am extremely grateful for their support, and I hope this book provides at least a partial payback for their generosity.

Emotional Support

Since this book represents my efforts of almost 60 years, I have dedicated it to my family tree, in recognition of all the emotional support that they have given me over these years. First, my children, when they were young, had to move around a number of times as we bounced back and forth between the United States and Europe when I was in the active data-collection macro phase of my life, particularly in the decade of the 1970s. Indeed, in the first 10 years of our marriage, Madeleine and I spent more than half our time in Europe, mainly Britain, France, and Germany. In addition, I had to leave my family alone for extended periods of time.

Second, my grandchildren have caused me to ponder how to make our present world a better place for them to live in. A Future Voyage is written for them to think about and hopefully guide them in the years ahead. My wife, my children, and my grandchildren have provided a constant emotional support that has sustained me throughout all of these decades. To all my teammates, friends, and family, my warmest thanks.

Notes

1 On a personal note, I chose Columbia precisely because it combined theory and research, and I had been advised to do so by Samuel Stouffer, who provided a cognitive map of the major three centers of sociology in the 1950s.

2 A description of this research study can be found in Hage ( 1974 ).

3 Originally, I tried to publish this structural-functional theory as a theory of society and organizations, as well as of other levels of analysis in the American Sociological Review , but Smelser felt that one should not approach theory this way. I then rewrote it as a theory related only to organizations, and it was accepted by Administrative Science Quarterly .

4 As so often happens, a beautiful research design crashed on the political realities of interorganizational conflicts. The host agency had a CEO who had established a reputation so that no one wanted to work with him. From this I learned that institutional/organizational innovators frequently have warts to accompany their creativity and problem solving capabilities.

5 The origin of my concern about being able to teach students how to think creatively stemmed from considerable dissatisfaction with my undergraduate training at the University of Wisconsin and also from the behavior of professors at Columbia who felt they were the only ones who could make contributions to the discipline. It was a radical attempt on my part to destroy this kind of hierarchical thinking.

6 My synthesis was built around cybernetic systems, but in the process, I completely missed two major intellectual developments at Stanford University: Meyer’s theory of myth as a source of the adoption of organizational models and Hannan and Freeman’s population-ecology theory.

Chapter One

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT KNOWLEDGE: PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM THEORY, KNOWLEDGE CREATORS, STRUCTURAL CHANGE, ADAPTIVE PROBLEMS, AND INSTITUTIONAL SOLUTIONS

The advanced industrialized countries of the world crossed over the threshold of the second millennium beaming with self-satisfaction and confidence in their futures; however, like the bubbles in a glass of New Year’s champagne, their effervescence soon began to fade. Societal stumbles encountered along the way to the future became increasingly visible. Social inequality, already on the increase, accelerated. Social mobility stagnated, and the educated classes increasingly choose to marry only those with the same credentials, further cementing social class divisions. Economic growth has been slow over the past several decades with a recent exception in the United States, leaving many people unable to obtain jobs for which they have been trained and causing sustained periods of underemployment and unemployment. Political distrust of institutions continues to spread, underpinning a series of social movements, such as those manifested in the upsurge of extremist political parties and even paramilitary militias that engage in violence. Recently, such movements have produced two electoral surprises: Brexit (the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union) and the election of President Trump in the United States. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 in 2001 against the twin towers of New York—along with a number of other targets since then such as trains in Madrid, buses in London, and nightclubs in Paris and elsewhere—have brought home, most dramatically, the shrinking of the world. While some would style the world as flat, we clearly have discovered some rather deep valleys. In many advanced industrialized countries, one sees at the community level the rise of rust-belt cities, depressed rural areas, and minority ghettos. Suicide, both formal and informal (in the form of deaths due to opioids), have become increasingly common, lowering advances in average life expectancy for the first time in a century. Meanwhile, those who live longer frequently find themselves socially isolated. Social capital shrinks and hatred of the other expands. Buoyant societal moods of self-satisfaction and self-confidence have been replaced by a troika of despair: alienation, powerlessness, and social isolation.

These changes reflect disruptions in the previous equilibrium that advanced industrialized societies have enjoyed for almost a century. We have to develop a new paradigm that synthesizes existing social science theories to both recognize and solve these disruptions that reflect adaptive problems. And rather than globalization being the usual boogeyman, the source of many of these disruptions in the twenty-first century originate in the intellectual progress we have made as measured by knowledge growth. To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan, knowledge is not the solution, knowledge is the problem! However, like many of his pronouncements, we may view this idea as only partially correct. Knowledge is a like a two-faced Janus God. On the one hand, knowledge growth has created many of these disruptions that are tearing the social fabric of society apart. On the other hand, knowledge is advancing solutions, many of which have not been recognized. The Janus face of the past calls attention to the failures of existing social selves, organizational forms, regions, and institutional arrangements to work well in the present because of new contingencies. The Janus face of the future calls attention to emerging new social selves, organizational forms, and regions that can provide guidelines for how to adapt and suggestions for action theory.

Explaining how new knowledge—usually perceived as a solution—may also cause disruptions and finding the solutions is one of the major objectives of this punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) of social evolution. In this sense, this book is quite different from the current paean to science, reason, and progress—Pinker’s (2018) Enlightenment Now—because it examines a number of contemporary problems and furthermore raises the question of how science can continue to make moral progress and how can we create more humanism.¹ Scientific individuals, research teams, and organizations also have to adapt to the new set of contingencies. Similarly, other branches of knowledge such as the social sciences—not just sociology but also economics and political science—must reinvent themselves because the equilibrium of society, the economy, and the political system have been punctured and the air is escaping in the form of many protest movements. Nineteenth-century sociological, economic, and political theorists attempted to comprehend the emergence of capitalism and democracy; we now address contemporary society, capitalism, and democracy—and all of their fundamental transformations and basic discontents—with solutions for these adaptive problems. Hence, part of the meaning of the subtitle for this book: action theory. What are some of the new adaptive problems at the macro institutional level? How can the educational system be reformed to create a new kind of society that gives individuals skills as well as hope for the future? How can the economy be reconstructed so that it grows faster and provides both jobs and a sense of empowerment? Finally, how can democracy be rebuilt so that protests are channeled effectively into the administration of programs and not just policy- and lawmaking? A parallel set of problems exists at the individual level and organizational level.

A second objective of the PET paradigm is to synthesize the many existing theories and perspectives that exist in sociology so that rather than being a fractious field, sociologists can engage in constructive dialogue with each other and hopefully the policy world. Precisely because sociology has served so many masters, it has failed to have any impact on the policy world and thus does not offer as many career lines as it could if the discipline could speak with one voice as economists have done given their paradigm of neoclassical economics. Furthermore, synthesizing distinctive views of society, both past and present and at various levels, the individual, organizational, and institutional provide a much more complex view of social reality. PET combines evolutionary theory, postmodernism, Marxism, functionalism, comparative institutional analysis, organizational theory, network theory, actor network theory, symbolic interactionism, role theory, dramaturgy, agency theory, and so forth into a new and much more accurate meta-narrative. Postmodernists have critiqued the kinds of narratives used in the social sciences. Combining these many approaches in our knowledge about social reality—also limited—avoids the errors that they have identified and unpacks the meaning of society. Furthermore, recognizing that distinctive theories have emerged in different stages of knowledge creation provides us with a whole new approach to the sociology of knowledge and understanding the origins of ideas, many of which reflect adaptations to existing disruptions.

The timing for a new paradigm such as PET would appear to be opportune. Evolution is back on the agenda for the social sciences. Why? Renewed academic interest emerged with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Darwin, celebrated in 2009, and evolution was selected as the topic for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In conjunction with this, various forms of evolutionary thinking in sociology and economics reappeared. In sociology, a study section called evolution, biology, and society emerged, and the Journal of Evolutionary Economics was founded at the beginning of this century. On a personal level, it seems that the changes people experience lead them to search for evolutionary patterns to make sense of what is happening around them. Signs of this search for patterns include the use of the word new, as in new economy (Adler and Heckscher 2006; Archibugi and Lundvall 2001; Soete 2003), and the word post, as in postindustrial society (Bell 1976; Toffler 1970) or postmodern but perhaps more telling is the term collaborative economy. For example, Crouch (1999: 39–45) in his analysis of social change in Western Europe wonders if it is postindustrial, post-Fordist, or postmodern.² The adjectives new and post imply some trajectory of evolution. Other patterns that are frequently mentioned in the news include innovation and technological change. As a consequence, innovation, which is the product of knowledge growth, has become the single most important topic in today’s social science journals (Fagerberg 2005).

The PET Paradigm of Social Evolution: The Construct of Knowledge, Equilibrium Stages, Social Evolutionary Theory Critiques, and the Role of Globalization

The motor of social evolution, as indicated in the title, is knowledge. But the construct of knowledge is a many-splendored thing that needs to be carefully defined since its components such as science, technology, and now the more ubiquitous word apps are what is discussed. This separation into parts has meant that its full force in social evolution has been underappreciated. More critically, what is the propulsion that not only drives knowledge but also leads to the acceleration in social change that so many observers report? These accelerations can be usefully distinguished by new stages of equilibrium, with the present being the third stage. Finally, we finish this first section by addressing two doubts: the many critiques of social evolution and the alternative perspective of globalization as the driver of social change.

The construct of knowledge: Components and perspectives

Knowledge at the individual level may be defined by the capacity to do things, including knowing how to read, write, and solve arithmetic problems or how to repair a car, clean the house, or cook a meal. At the organizational level, knowledge is the production of goods and services, whereas at the macro institutional level, knowledge creates resources that society needs. Returning to the individual level, the sense of knowledge as practice has been emphasized in a recent book by Gherardi (2006). She quotes Gergen as saying that knowledge is not something that people possess in their heads but rather that people do together (2006: 1).

The definition of collective knowledge at the organizational level as competency or capacity is consistent with the one found in the new knowledge paradigm in organizational sociology (Brown and Duguid 1998; Conner and Prahalad 1996; Kogut and Zander 1992, 1996; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995); again, this definition emphasizes the products and services produced by knowledge as a collective output. The parallel concept in evolutionary economics is Romer’s instructions (Warsh 2006), which builds upon the concept of routines from Nelson and Winter’s (1982) evolutionary theory of organizations. In population ecology, this idea has been called reproducibility (Aldrich and Ruef 2006; Hannan and Freeman 1984). A cognate definition may be found in the sociology of science (Rammert 2006), in which the theme is the replicability of research findings, something that increasingly appears to be difficult to do.³ Furthermore, knowledge is more than just information as Kogut and Zander (1992: 388) demonstrate at multiple levels.

Once we shift to the organizational level, it becomes much easier to recognize the four components of knowledge even though these exist at the individual level as well: hardware, software, skills, and ideas (see Table 1.1). In organizations, technology includes a set of machines and tools needed to operate individual processes or entire production lines, as distinct from other kinds of tools that are employed in marketing and management. Software can be easily understood because of the many discussions of apps, but software more generally refers to operating instructions that explain how to operate machines, including decision aids. In bureaucratic organizations, software denotes the rules manuals and operating procedures or recipes. Many bureaucratic rules have their origins in preventing the repetition of errors, and their accumulation over time leads to what is called red tape. Generic technology represents the combination of hardware and software. For example, flexible manufacturing, which is currently eliminating many human workers’ jobs, combines robots with software that programs their tasks, depriving all but the programmers of work.

Table 1.1 Level of Knowledge: Embeddedness a

a Modification of Hage and Powers (1992).

Skills reflect learning by doing; through experience, tacit knowledge accumulates (Argote and Miron-Spektor 2011; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Polanyi 1966). Orr (1990) has shown that (and how) meaningful knowledge is embedded in the daily work of organizations at multiple levels. Gherardi (2006) also provides a number of examples of workplace learning on a restoration construction site in Italy. Likewise, because economists view organizations as merely collections of individuals, they miss the important concept of the division of labor (Duguid 2008).⁴ Organizations are collections of individuals with diverse skill sets—and we might add interests—that constitute the capacity to make products or provide services or conduct research experiments. Schutz’s stock of knowledge (Allan 2005: chapter 9) is similar in meaning, although it does not emphasize this practical perspective.

Formal learning or human capital (Becker 1994, originally 1964) has become increasingly important for handling new technologies and makes an important contribution to the economic theory of growth. The concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977) reflects the accumulation of useful experiences at the individual level. In certain situations, especially in Europe, cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) can become an important skill necessary to occupying a high-status position. Ideas can include social beliefs about what is true. As a consequence, ideology becomes part of our understanding of knowledge; this is a necessary correction for many who critique the concept of knowledge as being too positivist or materialistic. In organizations, ideas include the strategies of firms, whereas in science, they represent the theories and paradigms of disciplines. Indeed, some of the worst ideologues are not conservative religious people but rather scientists wedded to a particular theory. These four components also define how one can measure the embeddedness of collective knowledge (Argote 1999: 71–86). Evidence for embeddedness can be found in payments to learn know-how in licensing agreements for patents (Arora et al. 2001: 188). Furthermore, as we shift from the individual to the collective, the diversity of each of these elements—machines and tools, software applications, skills, and ideas—becomes obvious and not easily reducible to individuals, although some still insist on stressing the micro-foundations of organizational structures. For economists, much the same distinction is made between human embodied knowledge and technological embodied knowledge (Landry et al. 2002).

Finally, we end on a philosophical point. The four components of knowledge speak to different traditions concerning the fundamental character of knowledge and truth claims. Both hardware and software (or, the rules of the game) reflect an empirical worldview of knowledge because both are based on a concrete reality of what works. These are material objects and therefore reflect an important element in actor-network theory (Latour 2005). In contrast, skills, especially expertise that includes tacit knowledge, and ideas that are contained in the modes of thought, reflect rational views of the world that are not necessarily based on empirical data but on social beliefs, including ideology about what works (Meyer 2009).⁵ These latter meanings move closer to some of the implicit ideas found in postmodernist discussions of language games and the need to critique them. Inherent in social beliefs are assumptions about the best way of accomplishing certain goals or ideology. For example, many believe that competitive markets are superior for achieving economic growth. This also illustrates how ideology can be used to dominate (Thompson 2016).

Punctuated equilibrium: Stages of knowledge creation

With this definition of knowledge, social evolution represents the movement from one stage of equilibrium to another defined by the ways in which knowledge is created. A new stage can be identified by a discontinuous leap in complexity, as measured by increases in each of the four components listed above in Table 1.1, and their relative mix, which varies across the three stages. In other words, each stage reflects a generalized punctuated equilibrium, first in several sectors, whether economic or noneconomic, and then gradually in other parts of society as well. Disruptions emerge when a next stage of complexity does not occur. But not all disruptions are necessarily negative. Some of them represent ways in which some individuals, organizations, and societies adapt, providing guidelines for others.

What drives the continual growth in knowledge? The motivation for continual knowledge creation arises naturally because solving simple scientific and applied problems leaves more difficult and complicated issues that in turn require more complex social and institutional arrangements as the next logical step in knowledge production. Kuhn (1970) argued that long periods of stability in the use of a specific scientific paradigm eventually leads to a period of revolutionary change, because old riddles are solved or various puzzles that are not solved by an existing paradigm shift the focus of attention, usually of individuals located on the margins of disciplines. The same is true for the paradigm of how science is produced. Over time, routine methods of solving problems no longer work, and a revolutionary change in the organization of knowledge creation occurs, generally not in the standard areas of research but rather in new disciplines. As Gersick (1991) has shown, this model of punctuated equilibrium applies to scientific revolutions and also to many other levels of analysis. The most important of these is the organization (Romanelli and Tushman 1994).

A revolutionary change in knowledge production implies that multiple parts of the system for discovering knowledge must mutate. Consistent with our definition of knowledge, this means new technologies, operating procedures, skill sets, and ideas housed in differentiated research units that have to be connected to the larger society so that learning continues. Differentiated research units must build in greater depth in expertise, because the problems become more difficult requiring an expanded skill range. One of the great advantages of Gersick’s (1991) analysis of punctuated equilibrium emerges from a comparison of failures to adapt across distinctive literatures, which allows one to comply a thought-provoking list of explanations for the failure to make necessary transformations at multiple levels. This kind of analysis moves us considerably beyond the simple concept of path dependency (see Part Three).

At a more profound level is a second question: Why is the movement toward more complex problems self-generating? Any theory of social evolution based on knowledge must solve this problem, because other theses about rationality (Meyer 2009) and technological stages cannot account for