Abstract
Research in computational organizational theory explores the complex interactions between organizations and their members. Organizations are legally autonomous entities that structure the efforts of individuals to achieve large goals. Interesting behavior often emerges from the interactions and demands of modeled primitives. This introduction describes the common ground and recent advances in multimodeling, multilevel modeling, and rapid model development. We conclude this summary with discussion of issues of model fidelity and model validation.
Introduction
Computational organization theory (COT) is a research discipline, which develops formal computational models to understand, extend, and examine organizational theory. Specific questions of interest to researchers in this field include organizational decision making, adaptation, and organizational learning. Often, these researchers are interested in the complex interdependencies between individuals and the organizations of which they aremembers.Organizations needindividuals tomake decisions, yet individuals benefit from membership in an organization: the organization is not merely the sum of its members.
Summary
In this article, we have introduced the area of COT. Research in COT explores the complex interactions between organizations and their members. Interesting behavior often emerges from the interactions and demands of modeled primitives, whether people or processes, although this introduction has focused on people-oriented simulation.
We have defined organizations as legally autonomous entities that attempt to achieve goals not within the capacity of any individual member. An organization’s pursuit of its goals will change both the organization and the environment in which it operates, affecting other organizations (and themselves) either beneficially or adversely. Members of an organization do tasks, and both require and generate knowledge in the performance of these tasks.
