orgtheory.net

Brayden

Satoshi Kanazawa, another Arizona sociology alumnus, has a penchant for writing provocative and often controversial articles. This trend may have something to do with Kanazawa’s embrace of evolutionary psychology, which he tries to use to thrash his colleagues from other social sciences (see for example the posts on Kanazawa’s work at Crooked Timber and Freakonomics). His work is always clever but usually has an irritating bite to it. No article demonstrates this better than his recent introduction to a special issue of Management and Decision Economics entitled, “‘First, kill all the economists…’ : The insufficiency of microeconomics and the need for evolutionary psychology in the study of management.”

In this paper, Kanazawa introduces the topic fairly straightforwardly. Business schools are dominated by economists and other economics-trained management scholars, he suggests, whose view of decision-making strays from the reality of human existence. He offers a fairly standard critique of microeconomic decision-making: it’s unidimensional and assumes a common utility ranking even though individuals are far more heterogenous in their preferences. But then, Kanazawa adds a curious twist to this critique. Unlike most sociologists who would follow the path of Simon’s bounded rationality reasoning, he argues that individuals display inherent sex differences that confound microeconomic reasoning. Men and women, he argues, do not reason similarly and the interaction between men and women can take profoundly different forms due to innate, biological characteristics.

The inadequacy of the microeconomics is apparent in its inability of explain, let alone solve, new and persistent problems in the corporate world, such as the problem of the ‘glass ceiling,’ sex gap in pay, occupational sex segregation, and sexual harassment. Why are there so few female top executives in large corporations when there are no formal barriers for women to occupy these jobs and despite many corporations’ concerted effort to hire female executives?….

Evolutionary psychology begins with the premise of fundamental and inherent differences between men and women. In areas of life during the human evolutionary history where men and women faced similar adaptive problems and thus natural selection was operative (such as procurement of food, protection from the elements, avoidance of predation), men and women share the same evolved psychological mechanisms comprising truly universal human nature. In areas of life where men and women faced different adaptive problems during evolutionary history and thus sexual selection was operative (such as intrasexual competition, finding and keeping mates, making parental investment), men and women have evolved distinct psychological adaptations, and therefore have distinct male and female natures. It is where actors execute their sexually-dimorphic psychological mechanisms, in distinct male or female human nature, that microeconomic model of the singular and unitary actor fails and evolutionary psychology prevails.

The special issue contains a number of examples that presumably illustrate how the evolutionary psychology framework can elucidate management problems, such as sexual harassment.

I have no problem with evolutionary psychology as a theoretical perspective, per se. However, the way that it’s often applied is unsettling. Sometimes evolutionary explanations are told like just-so stories. My problem with the way it is presented here is that it provides little room for variation across social contexts. Further, it can’t account for social change, such as the fact that women representation among top executives has changed considerably in the last decade and continues to change over time. Evolutionary psychology, in my brief estimation, can’t deal well with this variation and more than likely enters as a post-hoc justification for why some change failed to occur. I would be more interested in this stuff if evolutionary psychologists (or, as in the case of Kanazawa, sociologists) would begin talking more about which sorts of observed differences are most mutable through changes in the social conditions.

By the way, Kanazawa has one of the more unintentionally (or intentional?) hilarious book dedications I’ve ever seen. Kanazawa, who is a native of Japan, coauthored a book, Order by Accident, about Japanese society with Alan Miller. His dedication reads:

To Michael Hechter, without whom I would not be interested in Japan in the slightest.