Page 504 - Cultures and Organizations

The Evolution of Cultures 469

company is a bit like our thirty people finding themselves stranded on a
desert island. Their first job is to create working rules for everyday life, an

organization culture.
Organization theory and business economics study business evolution,
though they do not usually call it by that name just yet. Understanding the
tribal roots of our social instincts and the dynamic properties of cultural
evolution should lead to a better understanding of the success and failure
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of organizations. Managing is, in essence, mentoring evolutionary pres-
sure on the organization, its stakeholders, and its employees. Marketing,
in this light, is the study of attempts to change selective pressure imposed
by consumer behavior in favor of one’s products.

Government
Polities are replicators at the moral circle level. Politicians are continu-
ally negotiating and changing the rules of our most obvious moral circles
of today: our states. Numerous forms of government coexist that carry
elements of dictatorships, one-party systems, theocracies, military gov-
ernments, pluralistic democracies, populist democracies, and so on. Gov-
ernments adopt ideas from another and try to collaborate. There is a
worldwide tendency to find more common ground now that markets and

trade streams, as well as problems of many kinds and their solutions, are
obviously global. The time scale is years, decades, or centuries. The out-
come is uncertain, because our innate group fission-fusion tendencies are

often stronger than our conscious decisions. At some pivotal moments the
presence of one person or one new idea can change the world, but most of
the time, we are led by the current. Once the tide of a people’s collective
feeling is released, there is no swimming against it.

Technology
The effect of evolutionary hazards holds for technologies too. Technologies
are replicators that are invented and then improved. There is considerable

flexibility when a new evolutionary track starts, and a degree of freezing
sets in after that. Consider road transportation. The Romans were the fi rst
to build a road network across their empire. They set the standard by using
wheel carts with at most two horses side by side, not three. Road tracks
across Europe and its colonies inherit their template from the Roman two-
horse carts. Train rails and car tire span have adopted this width for prac-
tical reasons. The first cars looked like horse carriages, and car shapes

gradually developed from that point. Today’s drop-shaped aerodynamic