Cultural Evolution in
Business
A Project of the Collins
Educational Foundation
Business and Sustainability Program
Why
Socially Responsible Businesses Prosper and Related Puzzles
A Collins Educational Foundation Project
Project
Research Publications and Papers
Project Staff
Bios
Project Overview
The objective of this project is to help leaders of
businesses and other organizations make strategic, tactical,
and operational decisions based on sound science. Using the
theory of gene-culture coevolution as a tool, we provide a
framework within which executives can understand the
processes by which human social psychology evolved in the
remote past and corporate cultures evolve to accomplish
their objectives in the present. Evolutionary tools provide
a way to examine the processes of socioeconomic change and
the phenomenon of human cooperation. These topics are of
fundamental importance for organizational management, yet
the heretofore most powerful theory of human
behavior—rational choice theory from neoclassical
economics—treats them poorly. The evolutionary theory
explains why human nature is the complex mixture of
cooperation, selfishness and conflict that we observe in the
laboratory and in real life. The cooperative element of
human nature generates a moral hidden hand that is the main
motor for the evolution of the cultural rules that we
actually use to operate complex human organizations. The
management of organizations is mainly a matter of ensuring
that the moral hidden hand functions in the face of
individual selfishness and organizational complexities that
tend to frustrate its action. Businesses, and similar
mid-sized human organizations, are superorganisms that are
similar in some important ways to the tribes in which our
ancestors lived. Humans are adapted to live in tribes.
Business organizations that mimic tribes, but at the same
time creatively work around their limitations, function
best.
One of the
most important results of the theory of cultural evolution
and related empirical work is the support that it provides
for the concept of socially responsible business. Contrary
to rational choice theory, evolutionary investigations
suggest that profits should be positively, not negatively,
correlated with social responsibility and environmental
friendliness. Emerging evidence from the study of socially
responsible businesses finds that they do indeed perform
better financially than businesses that make no special
effort to be responsible to these non-traditional bottom
lines. We review the emerging science and draw from it seven
applied principles, each generating several socially
responsible strategies managers can use to improve the
performance of their organizations.
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Cultural
Evolution in Business project staff:
Peter J. Richerson, Ph.D.
Dwight E. Collins, Ph.D.
Russell M. Genet, Ph.D.
Biographies of project staff:
Peter J. Richerson, Ph.D. – Distinguished Professor
Emeritus of Environmental Science and Policy, University of
California at Davis. Dr. Richerson is one of the major
figures in the development of the theory of cultural
evolution. His first book with Robert Boyd in 1985, Culture
and the Evolutionary Process, is a classic in the field.
Richerson and Boyd were awarded the Staley Prize by the
School of American Research for a major contribution to the
human sciences in 1989. Richerson and Boyd have also written
Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human
Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005), an
accessible introduction to the field and The Origin and
Evolution of Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2005),
an anthology of their collective work. Dr. Richerson is the
author of over 200 journal articles, book chapters, book
reviews, and technical reports. He is former president of
the Society for Human Ecology and former treasurer of the
Society for Human Behavior and Evolution, and he has
organized the annual meetings of both societies. He has been
a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the
University of California—Berkeley, Duke University, the
University of Bielefeld (Germany), and Exeter University
(England). He has given invited talks to scholarly audiences
around the globe. The National Science Foundation currently
supports his work on cultural evolution. Trained as an
aquatic ecologist, he has also conducted National Science
Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency-funded
research on the ecology of lakes. Further information can be
found at his
UC Davis webpage.
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Dwight E. Collins, Ph.D. – President and Founder of
the Collins Educational Foundation
Dwight Collins teaches Operations Management and Industrial
Ecology at the
Presidio Graduate School,
San Francisco, and is a founding instructor and Chair of the
Presidio's MBA program. He directs the Collins
Educational Foundation, which has as its goal contributing
to and providing leadership in creating a sustainable human
presence on Earth. The Foundation organizes retreats and
conferences, e.g., Profitable Sustainability: The Future of
Business, co-sponsored with the Seattle based Network for
Business Innovation and Sustainability (NBIS) and Future
500. Dr. Collins is a member of INFORMS (Institute for
Operations Research and Management Science), the INFORMS
Practice Section Advisory Council, and the INFORMS
Roundtable. He held positions as Director of Aspen
Technology’s Strategic Planning Practice, Director of the
Semiconductor Industry Practice at Chesapeake Decision
Sciences, Inc., Senior Project Manager at Exxon Corporation,
Senior Consultant at the Logistics Management Institute (LMI)
(a Washington, D.C. think tank), and was a captain in the US
Air Force.
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Russell M. Genet, Ph.D.– Research Scholar in
Residence at California Polytechnic State University and an
Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at Cuesta College, both in
San Luis Obispo. Dr. Genet is also a cosmic evolutionist, a
field which seeks the grand synthesis of physical,
biological, and cultural evolution. His 1997 book The
Chimpanzees Who Would Be Ants (published by the Collins
Foundation Press explored humanity’s place in the cosmos,
our biological and cultural evolution, and four potential
futures. Dr. Genet developed rocket guidance systems
in the early days of the space age and worked with Dr.
Collins in the 1970s, developing the first life cycle cost
models of major systems. He is the co-founder of the
Fairborn Observatory (1979) and pioneered in the development
of robotic telescopes and remote mountaintop automated
systems. His work on robotic telescopes was featured in a
one-hour PBS documentary, The Perfect Stargazer. He is the
author or editor of over a dozen books on astronomy,
robotics, and cosmic evolution.
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Project Related Publications and
Papers
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