how self-organization, social capital and tacit knowledge affect an organization's absorptive capacity

Having just finished Darwin's Cathedral, I have returned to Charle's Ehin's book "Hidden Assets". The main idea is how self-organization, social capital and tacit knowledge affect an organization's absorptive capacity.  This is an interesting thesis, but I have to confess, I got quite bogged down in his evolutionary appeals.  Evolutionary psychologists are frequently critiqued for their loose functional appeals to pre-historic cultures.  These are anything but well understood.  In fact, when done poorly, they come across like an Umberto Echo book where backward connections are ridiculed for the conspiracy theories they engender.  Backwards connections do not imply causality.  Usually what happens is an author has a point they want to support.  To do so they look for a plausible selective advantage for the desired trait.  I found Ehin's book full of such tenuous appeals.

Poorly done evolutionary appeals also leave the genie out of the bottle.  In "Hidden Assets", Ehin gives evidence that un-management (his term for full self-organization with tribe sized business groups) is the strongest leverager of human capital.  While I believe this rather dogmatic assertion may apply in specific cases, I think it is a huge over-extension when generalized.  However, Ehin uses a functionalist appeal to evolutionary psychology to bolster his argument.  In doing so he fails to identify why we should accommodate evolutionary tendencies for un-managment but reject evolutionary tendencies towards despotism and hierarchial structures.  I suspect a standard free-loader argument would come into play here.  However, Ehin never used it.  This substantially undermines Ehin's book.  The questionable validity of functional appeals really demeans what should have been a very interesting thesis.

Successful explanations about how self-0rganization, social capital and tacit knowledge affect absorptive capacity would seem to require the following elements:

1. multi-level selection theory  (see Wilson's "Darwin's Cathedral")
2. structures limiting free-loader exploitation (see Wilson's "Darwin's Cathedral & Atran's "In God's we trust)
3. organizational entropy  - a.k.a - the rise and fall of organization structures (see Willis, 2004 in "A complexity and Darwinian approach to management with failure avoidance as the key tool")
4. group neuropsychology (I think the evolutionary psychology of religion is a fruitful approach to this question, although other branches of science certainly can offer quite a few insights as well)
5. a pragmatic philosophical base (I think Peirce is probably the best resource here - his physics background resonates well complexity theory and its history)
6. a tool like relational (social) networks for exploring and testing predictions

However, this certainly isn't an exhaustive list.  What elements need to be brought together for a full answer to Ehin's thesis?

Religion as a category of investigation

Can religion be considered a category of analysis in academic investigations?  The non-subjective sciences seem easy to excuse, while the arts seems easy to include.  The middle that interests me are the various branches of social sciences.

Qualitative investigations have a number of different tools at their disposal.  One popular approach is to view knowledge as a multi-faceted crystal (Richardson, 2003).  This encourages an unlimited degree of personal reflection.  In practice, researchers can either try to portray an issue's interesting complexity, they can probe a few different avenues of perspective, or they can boldly explain relevant factors.  Picking relevant categories for analysis is a reflexive process.  It is tied to the meaning the author and readers give to, and can make from, the category of investigation.  However, some categories, more than others, tend to illuminate the trees hidden by the forest.  I think religion is increasingly becoming one of these torches.  

There is no question that religion is a fundamental aspect of human behaviour.  There is also no question religious tendencies can produce their own substantial momentum.  Somewhere between the product and the seed lies individual influence.  During biographical investigations the utility of religion as a category is obviously graduated.   However, the slope, while slippery in places, is usually not avoided.  In organizational investigations, however, religion as a category of investigation is rare to non-existent.  There are some exceptions (Demerath, Hall, Scmitt & Williams, 1998). Quasi-religious and para-religious views emerged investigating religion's soft boundaries.  The company as a quasi-religious unit is an application of this investigation.

For religion to be an appropriate category of analysis in social science investigation, I believe, it should be limited to the level of group dynamics in an environment that has a robust culture, moralistic imperative and has demonstrated change resiliency.  I believe formal education fits this bill quite nicely.

Demerath N., Hall, P, Schmitt, T., Williams, R. (1998).  Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organization USA: Oxford Press.

Richardson, L. (2003). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.)
Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (pp. 499-541). USA: Sage.