Adapt vs. Change
Term
Adapt vs. Change
Idea level
Others (research and policy agenda)
Definition
While often conflated, adapt is not synonymous with change. Distinguishing between the two terms, Yuen Yuen Ang defines adaptation as a particular type of change in which agents fit themselves to changing environments through mechanisms such as variation and selection, whereas other forms of change—such as shocks or aging—do not involve adaptation.
In social settings, a further distinction is that effective adaptation depends on how success is defined and who defines it, whereas change in general may occur without any agreed end goal.
Applied empirically in Ang’s theory of Coevolutionary Development, she traces how mutual adaptation occurred through the mechanisms of variation, selection, retention, and niche creation in reform-era China, where the dominant criterion of success was GDP growth.
Sources
Ang, Y.Y. (2015). “Do Weberian Bureaucracies Lead to Markets or Vice Versa? A Coevolutionary Approach to Development.” In States in the Developing World (2017); SSRN (2015) doi:10.1017/CBO9781316665657.011.
Ang, Y.Y. (2016). How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. Chapter 2: Directed Improvisation.
Genealogy
[Pillar] Adaptive Political Economy (APE)
→ [Concept] Complex ≠ Complicated
→ [Concept] Adapt vs. Change: clarify that change can happen without adaptation
→ [Mechanisms] Variation, Selection & Niche Creation
→ [Theory] Coevolutionary Development
→ [Method] Mapping Coevolution
Quotes
[Definition] To study development – both market and state changes – as a coevolutionary process, the first order of business is to define “coevolution” and its associated term “adaptation.” The words “evolve” (or coevolve) and “adapt” are commonly used by social scientists in reference to change but seldom defined. As Holland, a leading theorist of complex adaptive systems, defines, adaptation is the process by which an agent “fits itself to the environment” (1996, 9). This process of “fitting” entails four distinct mechanisms, including variation (generating alternatives), selection (choosing among and recombining available alternatives to form new permutations), retention (keeping the selections or abandoning them for new selections at later periods), and niche creation (developing a unique role and resource space in relation to other units within a collective).
— Ang, “A Coevolutionary Approach,” pp. 284-5.
[Adapt as a bundle of mechanisms] The above example illustrates that adaptation is not a unidimensional variable (i.e., either you adapt or you don’t adapt); rather, it is a bundle of mechanisms. Collectively, these mechanisms drive the process of evolution.
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), Chapter 2, pp. 50.
[Gradual institutional change ≠ adapt] Social scientists have studied other types of institutional change that do not involve adaptive mechanisms. One variety is change via exogenous shock… like wars and colonial conquest… Another variety is “gradual institutional change,” which, I must stress, may or may not involve adaptation. Aging, wear and tear, and obsolescence are all gradual changes, but these processes do not entail learning nor are they driven by efforts to fit changing environments.”
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), Chapter 2, pp. 50-51.
[Politics of defining successful adaptation] “Once adaptation and evolution are defined, two implications emerge. The first concerns the definition of effective adaptation in social contexts… Quoting Axelrod and Cohen, ‘Clearly, different agents in a population may use different measures of success. So changes that are adaptations for some may not be for others.’ Hence, analyses of societal adaptation must be prefixed by these questions: Who gets to define success? Is it the state, certain parts of society, interest groups, academics, aid agencies, foreign consultants, or others? And how do these different agents define success?”
— Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), Chapter 2, pp. 51.
Concept Constellation
Across Ang’s work, Adapt vs. Change consistently co-appear with the following concepts and analytic themes: