Kenneth Boulding's Theories of Evolutionary Economics and Organizational Change: A Reconstruction

Vladislav Valentinov

Journal of Economic Issues, 2015, vol. 49, issue 1, 71-88

Abstract: I identify a discrepancy between Kenneth Boulding's wide-ranging contributions to evolutionary economics and his professed ecological approach to it. I argue that Boulding has undersold his true contributions to evolutionary economics by trying to embed them into the ecological approach. I endeavor to overcome this discrepancy by differentiating between two types of evolutionary change analyzed in Boulding's writings: ecological change and civilizational change. In contrast to ecological change, civilizational change entails the possibility for the evolving system to overstrain the carrying capacity of the environment, thus suggesting the precarious relationship between civilizational complexity and sustainability. This argument sheds new light on Boulding's theory of “social organizers,” such as exchange, threat, and the integrative system. Boulding's understanding of civilizational change envisages the key role of threat and exchange in enabling civilizational complexity, while the integrative system is called upon to make this complexity sustainable.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2015.1013880

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