Please distribute to others who may be interested...
You are hereby invited to a seminar in our twelfth
interdisciplinary series on Evolution,
Complexity and Cognition (ECCO 2016-2017)
Time: Friday, January 20, 14h-16h
Place: room PL5.5.61, building: Pleinlaan 5 - 5th floor,
VUB
NOTE: this is not in the usual seminar building on the VUB
campus, but in a building on the opposite side of the campus on the
Pleinlaan/Avenue de la Plaine
A Memetic View on the
Firm
Dirk Bruin
https://nl.linkedin.com/in/dirkbruin
Abstract:
The research concerns the behavior of people associated with firms and the behavior of the firms themselves. In fact it is unclear what the substance of a firm is. The research question is just that: 'What is a firm?' The approach is to involve horizontal evolution of by way of memes. Memes emerge from individuals' beliefs: what they are familiarized with, they can come to believe and their beliefs lend them rules for their decisions.
Memeplexes form because of the relational properties between
memes. As a result of the formation of memeplexes, individuals
can have access to the corresponding 'tools for thought'. In the
field of management science these tools can be rather experimental in
a Popperian way. When they are motivated by some meme,
individuals can decide upon them and act, depending on the properties
of the memes involved. Individuals' behavior is affected by
their belief system. In addition their behavior in the aggregate
(many individuals) can lead to correlated patterns of behavior.
This is the basis for the existence of firms.
In Western culture a body of beliefs and corresponding rules is established for economic life, namely concerning the decisions of people interacting (transacting) with other people. This body itself is the subject of many people's beliefs, vivid especially in the Anglo-saxon sphere, and so it coordinates individuals' behavior. Bear in mind, however, that the future of the host is less important than the future of the meme itself. This element of the wider Western culture leads to rules that can explain the existence of firms, their behavior on a macro-level, autonomous to some extent.
Firms in this sense co-evolve with elements in their environment
in a monadic way. The memeplexes that underpin firms transpose
local behavior of individuals to global behavior of the entire
system. The middleware for understanding this operation is
provided by game theory. In this way firms can be seen as units
of computation that both reflect and anticipate their environment at
each point in time as best they can.
BIO
Dirk received an Msc in Financial Economics from the Vrije
Universiteit of Amsterdam in 1993. He was active in Management
Consulting in The Netherlands and in Southern Africa until 2006. Dirk
acquired a textile production firm in 2006, transferred its production
to Tunisia and branched its activities out to the United Kingdom. The
entire business was divested in 2014. Until present he is engaged in a
private research project into a more fundamental, namely memetic,
approach to Firm theory, explaining the existence of firms and
describing their behavior on a fundamental level.
He has finished a manuscript of a book on that topic, and
considers developing it into a PhD for the ECCO research group.
More on Dirk's research blog: http://magrathea-tlc.nl
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Francis Heylighen
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
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Francis Heylighen
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
