Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As the scientific study of macro-social phenomena, IR is now at pains to capture and map complex causal mechanisms in these ‘big, slow-moving, and invisible processes’. Complexity Theory (CT), the scientific study of organization, change and evolution in

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: That people are self-interested is one of the fundamental assumptions of economics and, increasingly, political science. Results from economics experiments, however, along with everyday experience, call this assumption into question. In divide-the-dollar ultimatum games, participants regularly turn down offers that they deem insufficient, even though they would objectively be better off if they accepted. Drivers stuck in a traffic jam get angry at the car that cruises illegally by on the shoulder, even though the moving driver’s actions cost those who are stopped nothing. And restaurant patrons will glare at a person talking on a cellphone at a distant table even though they cannot hear the conversation. If the stuck drivers or the irritated diners could inflict some punishment for the transgressions they observe, many would, even at some cost to themselves. Such punishment strategies appear irrational because they make the punisher worse off than doing nothing (or, in the case of the ultimatum game, than accepting the offered split). Nonetheless, we see unrewarded and costly (or potentially costly) punishment strategies at work in economics laboratories and in the real world. Why? We examine existing explanations for costly punishment, from altruistic defense of social mores to “wary cooperation” (Hibbing and Alford 2004) and then use new methods of evolutionary game theory to explain why costly punishment behavior can be rational and when we should expect it to occur.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper demonstrates how the animal, as biological species and as idea or human potentiality became important to post-Darwinian understandings of and debates about education and child development. I show how in late nineteenth-century America, the discourses of child study and nature study, on the one hand, and the literary naturalist novels of education, on the other hand, imagined very different pedagogical roles for the animal and animality. Both believed that the developing human child retraced the species’ evolutionary history, that ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny, and that exposure to the natural world was spontaneously educational – what I term autopedagogy. However they ultimately articulated very different models of education and development.

Advocates of child study (such as G. Stanley Hall) and nature study (such as Liberty Hyde Bailey) believed that isolation from nature and the animal world was detrimental; accordingly, they argued for an education in and through nature, whereby the child would pass through animal and savage developmental stages. In this linear and instrumental model, animality was something to be given its moment, but ultimately abandoned or repressed on the way to developing a modern self. Within this model, the animal and notions of evolutionary development were used to naturalize education and to normalize the modern human subject.

The naturalist authors Frank Norris and Jack London presented a model of education that lacked the directionality and teleology of child and nature study, but relied on the same underlying evolutionary logic. Instead of a linear progression, they advocated what often amounted to an antipedagogy, whereby the deleterious effects of culture and formal education were stripped away, leaving a more animal core. While these authors frequently described what amounted to devolution, imagined as a linear process that proceeded in the opposite direction, away from the human, they also described the unpredictable reactivation of animality and primitive instincts within human characters. These events are evolutionary discontinuities, non-linear changes. In naturalist novel of education, such as Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914) and London’s autobiographical Martin Eden (1909), education and development are radically reimagined, such that they become separated from notions of progress and humanization. Indeed, these perverted Bildungsroman force one to question whether education can exist or remain recognizable without teleology.

Take together, these two different examples show how the animal became important in reimagining education in the Darwinian age. They also explain how the notion that exposure to nature is spontaneously educational – an idea that still has currency – frequently rests on Darwinian assumptions and a recapitulationary logic. This logic imagines that developmental errors could be corrected through temporary, controlled regression – a return to animality – that allows for a sort of rebirth.

More generally this paper shows how, at a particular historical moment, the animal was used to debate and redefine the human, extending and testing this ontological and epistemological category. It thus contributes to a broad reconsideration of the significance of the animal in American culture.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper we argue that recent scholarship emanating from the field of evolutionary psychology (EP) promises to further current understandings of organizational communication practices and processes. To this end, we review EP’s core assumptions about human nature and behavior, and then examine two adaptive mechanisms that underlie the ubiquitous practice of workplace collaboration. Next, we describe how reciprocal altruism and preference for similarity underscore the exchange and coordination activities of employees’ relationships at work. The model of relationship development we propose is then discussed in terms of uncertainty, employee adjustment and organizational integration processes. In conclusion, we highlight the potential of EP as both a meta-theoretic framework through which seemingly disparate areas of scholarship can be unified, as well as a vehicle for theoretical development, a catalyst of novel predictions about communication in organizations, grounded in ultimate, rather than proximate causation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Globalization seems to be omnipresent. Volumes have been written about it over the past few years, as scholars from many disciplines have attempted to define and account for the phenomena and processes the term describes. Most research on globalization, however, is largely a-theoretical; and even when there is an attempt to part with pure empiricism, the result is a theory on globalization, not a theory of globalization. In this paper, I argue for an evolutionary theoretical framework, which would allow for much needed theory-driven empirical analysis of global transformations. Aspects of the European Union ?project? are used to illustrate how evolutionary theory captures change in the making. The paper concludes with a critique of this approach and outlines a research agenda that would lead to further development and resolution of current limitations.