Date of Award
Spring 5-2022
Level of Access Assigned by Author
Open-Access Thesis
Language
English
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Advisor
Timothy Waring
Second Committee Member
Caroline Noblet
Third Committee Member
Andrew Crawley
Additional Committee Members
Christine Beitl
Marco Smolla
Abstract
Organizations are pervasive in modern society and the factors of their evolution are the subject of considerable scholarship. Most literature on organizational evolution focuses on the role of leaders and entrepreneurs, specifically their decision making interacts with market forces. However, the behavior and interactions of regular organization members, such as nonmanagerial employees or club members, is surprisingly overlooked. Specifically, examinations of social dilemmas between co-workers and the role of learning are often discounted in the current literature. This dissertation explores how the dynamics of cooperation and the learning of preferences as cultural traits become consequential in the evolution and longevity of organizations in the case of small food buying clubs. I begin by explicitly defining a model of organizational evolution that draws on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. I then use a novel dataset to analyze cooperation and reciprocity in a real-world setting, and examine how preferences are interdependent and socially learned. I then use the results of these investigations to test the model of organizational evolution put forth in the first chapter by estimating a survival model of food buying clubs. Results indicate that individuals within these clubs display high amounts of reciprocity, and preferences that shift and diversify over time, both of which may play a role in the survival of these clubs.
Recommended Citation
Lange, Taylor, "The Organizational Evolution of Small Food Buying Clubs" (2022). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3573.
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/3573