Applications of Kauffman's Coevolutionary NKCS Model to Management and Organization Studies

Applications of kauffman's coevolutionary nkcs model to management and organization studies A number of studies have used tuneable, abstract models of organism evolution like Kauffman's (1993) NK model to capture and explore aspects of organizations and their adaptation in the business environment (e.g. Levinthal, 1997; Rivkin, 2000; Lenox et al., 2007; Rivkin and Siggelkow, 2003, 2007). However, these studies have not typically considered the fact that organizations exist within an ecosystem of other organizations, and further that a large organization may be seen as an ecosystem of semi-autonomous departments itself. Whereas the NK model has been adopted and extended by many researchers, applications of the coevolutionary NKCS model are sparse. A number of researchers have used the NKCS model as a theoretical lens but few have built an NKCS implementation and experimented with it in the social science domain.