Pre-organization theory: an evolutionary approach integrating memetics, inducement-contribution theory and generalized darwinism

Purpose Organization theory seeks to explain how people coordinate their behaviors to achieve common objectives, but it has offered little insight into how organizations emerge from such coordination. Fully understanding entities requires knowing their origins. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to and to suggest an approach for fortifying a foundational weakness in organization theory: pre-organization theory. Design/methodology/approach To develop pre-organization theory, this paper employs an evolutionary approach that integrates three theories. This paper first employs memetics to articulate a unit of selection, the i-memeplex, and next introduces inducement-contribution theory to tailor the i-memeplex to pre-organization, yielding a founder’s mental map for exchanges of inducements and contributions. It then applies generalized Darwinism to complete its evolutionary theory of pre-organization. Findings Memetics, inducement-contribution theory, and generalized Darwinism can be integrated to create a promising theoretical solution, but further investigation is needed to assess the empirical and practical value of pre-organization theory. Originality/value This paper contributes to organization theory by (1) explicating a foundational weakness in organization theory – its lack of pre-organization theory – and (2) integrating a novel set of theories to develop an evolutionary theory of pre-organization.