958 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
aspects of change in human institutions and technologies might improve our grasp
and handling of the social and political systems that surround and include us. For
example, in a stimulating paper emanating from her own research on "project
groups" formed to study and initiate organizational change, Gersick (1991)
explored the commonalities of punctuational change at six distinct levels of
increasing scope—in the lives of individuals, the structures of groups (her own
work), the history of human organizations, the history of ideas, biological
evolution (our work on punctuated equilibrium), and general theory in physical
science (Prigogine on bifurcation theory). Her paper, published in the Academy of
Management Review, bears the title, "Revolutionary change theories: a multilevel
exploration of the punctuated equilibrium paradigm," and begins by stating:
"Research on how organizational systems develop and change is shaped, at every
level of analysis, by traditional assumptions about how change works. New
theories in several fields are challenging some of the most pervasive of these
assumptions, by conceptualizing change as a punctuated equilibrium: an
alternation between long periods when stable infrastructures permit only
incremental adaptations, and brief periods of revolutionary upheaval." (See also
Wollin, 1996, on the utility of punctuated equilibrium for resolving the dynamics
of growth of complex human and social systems in general: "A hierarchy based
approach to punctuated equilibrium: an alternative to thermodynamic self-
organization in explaining complexity.")
In her own work on "task groups," Gersick (1988) reached a surprising
conclusion. These associations did not proceed incrementally towards their
assigned goals, but rather tended to hem, haw and dither until they reached a
particular, and temporally definable, point of quick transition towards a solution.
"Project groups," she writes (1991, p. 24), "with life spans ranging from one hour
to several months reliably initiated major transitions in their work precisely
halfway between their start-ups and expected deadlines. Transitions were triggered
by participants' (sometimes unconscious) use of the midpoint as a milestone,
signifying 'time to move.'"
These particular results inspired Gersick's more general consideration of
punctuational models. In so doing, she explicitly follows both approaches
previously advocated (p. 928) as strategies for transcending metaphor and
discovering causally meaningful connections among punctuational phenotypes of
change across levels and disciplines: the identification of "conjoints," or properties
correlated with the basic punctuational pattern (the basic strategy of documenting a
complexity in number and interaction of parts too high to attribute to causally
accidental resemblance, and therefore necessarily based on homology); and the
proposal of a general rationale, transcending the particular of any scale of analysis
or class of objects, for the punctuational character of change.
For example, Gersick emphasizes the need for active resistance towards
change as a validation of stasis, and she makes the same link that Eldredge and I
have stressed for biological evolution between punctuational change in hierarchical
systems and structural constraint viewed as partly contrary to an