category: Economy
The Biology of Business: Homo Administrans
Source: The Economist
SCURRYING around the corridors of the business school at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in his white lab coat last year, Michael Zyphur must have made an incongruous sight. Visitors to management schools usually expect the staff to sport suits and ties. Dr Zyphur’s garb was, however, no provocative fashion statement. It is de rigueur for anyone dealing with biological samples, and he routinely collects such samples as part of his research on, of all things, organisational hierarchies. He uses them to look for biological markers, in the form of hormones, that might either cause or reflect patterns of behaviour that are relevant to business.
Since its inception in the early 20th century, management science has been dominated by what Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two evolutionary psychologists, refer to disparagingly as the standard social science model (SSSM). This assumes that most behavioural differences between individuals are explicable by culture and socialisation, with biology playing at best the softest of second fiddles. Dr Zyphur is part of an insurgency against this idea. What Dr Cosmides and Dr Tooby have done to psychology and sociology, and others have done to economics, he wants to do to management. Consultants often talk of the idea of “scientific” management. He, and others like him, want to make that term meaningful, by applying the rigour of biology.
To do so, they will need to weave together several disparate strands of the subject—genetics, endocrinology, molecular biology and even psychology. If that works, the resulting mixture may provide a new set of tools for the hard-pressed business manager.
Read more at The Economist
