ABSTRACT
Firms instantiate processes of distributed cognition that take cues from the embedding environment to produce behavioral responses consonant with their historical trajectory, available resources, and cultural milieu, roughly analogous to a kind of epigenetic catalysis. Modes of behavioral expression having adaptive value can become fixed in the cultural heritage of the firm by learning or selection: systems requiring too much ‘energy’ for phenotypic adaptation to environmental demands will fail. Such evolutionary dynamics in simple Schumpeterian market economies will remain self-dynamic, self-referential, continually bootstrapping phenomena. In effect, Schumpeterian economies are ‘languages that speak themselves,’ largely independent of the needs or wishes of those embedded in them.
