Evolution on a Dancing Landscape: Organizations and Networks in Dynamic Blau Space

Abstract

This article develops and tests an evolutionary model of the growth, decline, and demographic dynamics of voluntary organizations. The model demonstrates a strong analogy between the adaptive landscape of Sewall Wright (1931) and the exploitation surfaces generated by a model of member selection and retention for voluntary associations. The article connects the processes of membership recruitment and loss to the social networks connecting individuals. The model generates dynamic hypotheses about the time path of organizations in sociodemographic dimensions. A key idea in this model is that membership selection processes at the individual level produce adaptation in communities of organizations. The article concludes with an empirical example and some discussion of the implications of the model for a variety of research literatures. Predicting the behavior of empirical systems has proven to be an elusive goal for the social sciences. This article outlines a theory that predicts the growth, decline, and demographic changes of social groups. The theory posits a Darwinian mechanism of systematic variation, selection, and retention of members in groups. Social network theory provides a framework for understanding how social evolution (the transitions from hunting and gathering societies through the intervening stages to the contemporary industrial stage) has created the conditions for the Darwinian mechanism of the model. This study takes a brief tour through the macroevolutionary foundations of the theory to set the stage for the microevolutionary test of the model. The predictions tested in the article are in the short term - over a period of less * Work on this article was supported by National Science Foundation grants SES-8120666, SES