THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY

The evolution of technology is a central theme for management theory due to the trans -formative effect of technological change on societies, markets, industries, organizations, and individuals. Over the last decades, scholars from a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions have generated a vast yet dispersed body of literature on tech-nology evolution. We offer a comprehensive synthesis of the major streams of scholar-ship on technology evolution by dividing the literature into four perspectives: technology-realist, economic realist, cognitive interpretivist, and social constructionist. We further show that each perspective offers a divergent account of three central mecha-nisms-variation, selection, and retention-that drive discrete, continuous, and cyclical patterns of technology evolution. We integrate these perspectives by highlighting that they all emphasize recombination, environmental fit, and path dependence as central drivers of those three mechanisms. This integration opens paths toward a more complete account of technology evolution than that offered by the currently scattered state of the extant literature. We emphasize the need for a coevolutionary framework that cuts across the four perspectives to push the literature forward. Subsequently, we outline the foundation of this framework and propose future research opportunities by which the literature on the evolution of technology can advance.