Phylogenetic
Methods

Phylogenetics
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Input-output
Data

Data Conversion

Algorithms

Software Use

An Alternative
Approach

Bibliography

The only example of an explicit use of the methods of ordinary biological systematics to industries that are known to the present author has been made by a group of organisation theorists that are inspired by the cladistic school of biological systematics. This work by McCarthy and his colleagues concerns the systematics and evolution of organisational forms within individual industries. Their primary study concerns the automobile assembly industry, but there is also a smaller study of the hand tool industry.

• McCarthy, Leseure, Ridgway and Fieller (1997), Building Manufacturing Cladograms, International Journal of Technology Management, Vol. 13, pp. 269-286.
• McCarthy, Ridgway, Leseure and Fieller (2000), Organisational Diversity, Evolution and Cladistic Classifications, Omega, Vol. 28, pp. 77-95.
• Leseure (2000), Manufacturing Strategies in the Hand Tool Industry, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Vol. 20, pp. 1475-1487. Fernandez, McCarthy and Rakotobe-Joel (2002), An Evolutionary Approach to Benchmarking, Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 8, pp. 281-305.
• Leseure (2002), Cladistics as Historiography: Part I - Introduction to cladistics, Management Decision, Vol. 40, pp. 486-496.
• Allen, Peter M. (2002), The Complexity of Structure, Strategy and Decision Making, Paper for the Meeting of the Brisbane Club, Manchester 5-7 July 2002.

In this work the emphasis is put on the determination of characteristics that uniquely discern between different organisational forms as well as on the gradual addition of these advanced characteristics to more primitive organisational forms. The characteristics have been found both in historical records and through the study of present-day firms. The ancestral organisational forms are found in different kinds of craft-based assembly, while the derived forms include different US and Japanese types of assembly.

Given a matrix of distinguishing characteristics of the individual forms of organisation, it is a simple task to reconstruct their family tree (in this literature called a cladogram). The reason for this simplicity is that only characteristics that support the tree is included in the cladistic sifting of characteristics. Thus the maximum parsimony algorithm will directly lead to a tree that is depicted in figure below. As practical taxonomists McCarthy et al. are not only interested in the resultant tree. They also want to depict how characteristics are gradually added (and in one case subtracted) as we move around in the tree. For thus purpose they use the package MacClade, which has facilities for automatically adding changed characteristics names to the branches of the tree.

The tree of the figure demonstrates how more advanced forms of craft production gradually emerges. But after the emergence of large-scale assembly, two separate subtrees emerges - starting from the split between Fordist mass production and just-in-time systems of assembly. But the evolutionary meaning of the branching process is not clear. For instance, it is not obvious that it is not possible for a particular organisation to jump from one subtree to another. Actually, it shows up that fairly large and quick jumps are envisaged by McCarthy et al. Thus the conditions for a jump from Fordist mass production to lean production is discussed by Fernandez et al. (2002). A more evolutionary plausible interpretation of the situation in a population of automobile assembly firms vis-a-vis the tree of organisational forms is found in a simulation model of Allen (2002), which builds on McCarthy et al. In Allen's study the different characteristics of individual organisational forms are interdependent, so large-scale jumps are unlikely aspects of the evolutionary process.

Although the present approach may in the long run end up with studies that are not too different from those of McCarthy et al., the immediate agenda is quite different. There are several major differences.

• The present approach concerns aggregates of firms for which we have publicly available information on many characteristics (e.g. from input-output tables), while the automobile study concerns an in-depth study of a small set of firms.
• The present approach uses whole (input-output) datasets, while the automobile study has only retained the (53 or 54) characteristics that directly served the differentiation of the selected organisational forms.
• The present approach is largely abstracting from the particular state of a particular characteristic. Instead the emphasis is put on the differences between industries over large and potentially conflicting sets of characteristics. It is this fact that makes the methods and software of molecular biology possible and necessary. The automobile study is tracing the change of individual characteristics, so it emphasises the methods and software (like MacClade) of numerical taxonomy.
• The present approach assumes that entities (industries) evolve in parallel, so that they will not show exactly the same characteristics at two points of time or in two countries. In the automobile study firms are also allowed to evolve, but they are classified according to organisational forms that do not evolve after they have emerged.
• The present approach may serve to reevaluate the classification systems used in industrial statistics---more or less like any reconstructed tree (phylogram/cladogram) produced in biology implies a reevaluation of the Linnean hierarchical system. The automobile study has no such ambitions.