Economics is the social science that studies how people interact with value; in particular, the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Gradualism, from the Latin gradus ("step"), is a hypothesis, a theory or a tenet assuming that change comes about gradually or that variation is gradual in nature and happens over time as opposed to in large steps. Uniformitarianism, incrementalism, and reformism are similar concepts.
Evolutionary economics is part of mainstream economics as well as a heterodox school of economic thought that is inspired by evolutionary biology. Much like mainstream economics, it stresses complex interdependencies, competition, growth, structural change, and resource constraints but differs in the approaches which are used to analyze these phenomena.
Economic geography is the subfield of human geography which studies economic activity. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics.
Post-Fordism is the dominant system of economic production, consumption, and associated socio-economic phenomena in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century. It is contrasted with Fordism, the system formulated in Henry Ford's automotive factories, in which workers work on a production line, performing specialized tasks repetitively, and organized through Taylorist scientific management. Definitions of the nature and scope of post-Fordism vary considerably and are a matter of debate among scholars. Changes in the nature of the workforce include the growth of labor processes and workflows relying on information and communication technologies and digital labor.
Path dependence is when the decisions presented to people are dependent on previous decisions or experiences made in the past.
Spontaneous order, also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process in social networks including economics, though the term "self-organization" is more often used for physical changes and biological processes, while "spontaneous order" is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the population during that process. Thirdly, it is a phenotypic trait or adaptive trait, with a functional role in each individual organism, that is maintained and has evolved through natural selection.
Pascal Robert Boyer is a French-American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature.
In systems theory, a system or a process is in a steady state if the variables which define the behavior of the system or the process are unchanging in time. In continuous time, this means that for those properties p of the system, the partial derivative with respect to time is zero and remains so:
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".
Hobart Peyton Young is an American game theorist and economist known for his contributions to evolutionary game theory and its application to the study of institutional and technological change, as well as the theory of learning in games. He is currently centennial professor at the London School of Economics, James Meade Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Oxford, professorial fellow at Nuffield College Oxford, and research principal at the Office of Financial Research at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Complexity economics is the application of complexity science to the problems of economics. It sees the economy not as a system in equilibrium, but as one in motion, perpetually constructing itself anew. It uses computational and mathematical analysis to explore how economic structure is formed and reformed, in continuous interaction with the adaptive behavior of the 'agents' in the economy.
In organizational theory, dynamic capability is the capability of an organization to purposefully adapt an organization's resource base. The concept was defined by David Teece, Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen, in their 1997 paper Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management, as "the firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments".
Richard R. Nelson is an American professor of economics at Columbia University. He is one of the leading figures in the revival of evolutionary economics thanks to his seminal book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982) written jointly with Sidney G. Winter. He is also known for his work on industry, economic growth, the theory of the firm, and technical change.
Technology dynamics is broad and relatively new scientific field that has been developed in the framework of the postwar science and technology studies field. It studies the process of technological change. Under the field of Technology Dynamics the process of technological change is explained by taking into account influences from "internal factors" as well as from "external factors". Internal factors relate technological change to unsolved technical problems and the established modes of solving technological problems and external factors relate it to various (changing) characteristics of the social environment, in which a particular technology is embedded.
Innovation economics is a growing economic theory that emphasizes entrepreneurship and innovation. In his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, economist Joseph Schumpeter introduced the notion of an innovation economy. He argued that evolving institutions, entrepreneurs and technological changes were at the heart of economic growth. However, it is only in recent years that "innovation economy," grounded in Schumpeter's ideas, has become a mainstream concept".
Sidney Graham Winter is a US economist and Professor Emeritus of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is recognized as one of the leading figures in the revival of evolutionary economics.
'Technological innovations have occurred throughout history and rapidly increased over the modern age. New technologies are developed and co-exist with the old before supplanting them. Transport offers several examples; from sailing to steam ships to automobiles replacing horse-based transportation. Technological transitions (TT) describe how these technological innovations occur and are incorporated into society. Alongside the technological developments TT considers wider societal changes such as “user practices, regulation, industrial networks, infrastructure, and symbolic meaning or culture”. For a technology to have use, it must be linked to social structures human agency and organizations to fulfill a specific need. Hughes refers to the ‘seamless web’ where physical artifacts, organizations, scientific communities, and social practices combined. A technological system includes technical and non-technical aspects, and it is a major shift in the socio-technical configurations when a technological transition occurs.
In organisational theory, organisational routines are “repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors”. Routines have been used in evolutionary economics and in generalized evolutionary theory as a social replicator – a mechanism that acts as biological genes in that it can pass certain behaviors and knowledge. It has also been used in the research literature on organisational learning, serving as a sort of “memory”, especially of uncodified, tacit knowledge. In the strategic management research literature, especially in the area of resource-based view of firms, organisational routines are often used as the microfoundations of organisational capabilities and dynamic capabilities. Despite the extensive usage of the routines concept in the research literature, there is still much debate about organisational routines. For example, scholars see them both as a source of stability and as a driver of organisational change. In an attempt to better understand the “inside” of organisational routines, Pentland and Feldman offered the distinction between the ostensive and performative aspects of routines. The latter refers to the actual actions performed by actors, while the former often refers to some abstract “script” that represent that routines more abstractly. Cohen and Bacdayan showed that from a cognitive perspective, routines are stored as procedural memory, and hence it is not likely that there is script that codifies routines. In contrast, some scholars have likened routines to grammars of actions.