Commitments: From Individual Intentions to Groups and Organizations

The aim of these notes is to introduce some notions of Commitment which are crucial for the understanding of groups and organizations’ functioning, and of the relations between individual agents and collective activity. I try to identify some of the basic ingredients of such notions, and to make some steps towards their formalization. In particular, I claim that a notion of Commitment is needed as a mediation between the individual and the collective one. Before constructing a notion of "Collective or Group Commitment" a notion of "Social Commitment" is to be defined. "Social commitment" is not an individual Commitment shared by many agents; it is the Commitment of one agent to another agent. I stress the normative contents (entitlements/obligations) of this social relation, and its connections with individual intentions and collective activity. On that basis, a notion of Organi~,ational Commitment is proposed, that could account for the structure of stable Organizations, and the related notions of "role" and of "power of command". This view, ba.q~d on one side on the intrinsic normative aspects of Social Commitment, and on the other side on the dependence and power relations that found a team, a group, an Organization, is quite in contrast with the "conversationar’ view of Organization in which agents seem to be completely free to negotiate and establish any .~rl of Commitment. 1. lntroductive remarks There is an implicit agreement about Organizations in recent computational studies. Either in DAI thcorics of organization [BON89] [GAS91], or in formal thcories of collective activity, team or group work, joint intention, and "social agents" [LEV90] [RAO92], or in CSCW approaches to cooperation [WIN87]. Organization is accounted for by means of the crucial notion of "commitment". "Commitment" is seen as the glue of the group, of collective activity: it links the agent with the joint goal and the common solution, it links members’ actions with the collective plan, it links the members with each other. Unfortunately, the current analysis of Organizations in terms of Commitment is quite unsatisfactory, for a number of reasons: a) the current definitions of Commitment are insufficient to really account for stable group constitution and activity; b) there is a dangerous confusion between the notion of "social" and the notion of "collective", so there is no theory of "social commitment" as a necessary premise for a theety of collective or group commitment; c) the relationships among the personal commitment to an action (implied in the notions of "intention" and "intentional act"), the group’s commitment o the collective act, and the commitment of a member to its group and the collective activity, are not clearly stated; d) agents seem to be completely free (also organizations) to negotiate and establish any sort of Commitment with any partner, without any constraint of 38 From: AAAI Technical Report WS-93-03. Compilation copyright © 1993, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. dependence and ix)wcr relations, of norms and procedures, o[" pre-esulblished plans and cooperations ICAS92b]. I would like to discuss this problem which is crucial to the relations between "AI and Theories of Group and Organization". In particular, we would try to analyse a notion of "Social Commitment" as distinct on one side from the notion of "Individual-Internal commitment", and from the notion of "Collective Commitment", on the other side. This notion of Social Commitment is a relational one; it cannot be defined with regard to one single agent (be it an individual or a group); however, this notion is not purely bchaviourist, like in [SIN92]: it is not reducible to the individual commitments, but it implies individual Commitment a d is analysed in terms of the mental states of the panners. On such a basis (and on the basis of the notion of GenericCommitmen0 1 would propose: a characterisation of the kind of Commitment that supports the structure of an Organization, including: the notion of "role"; the claim that there is no Organization without Obligations (norms); a criticism of the "conversational view" of organization. Such an approach is not only necessary for a good definition of our concepts and for developing a formal theory of groups, organizations, collective actions, but also for some consequences in applicative terms. For example, without such a kind of analysis it seems impo~ible to account for different kinds of organization (e.g. strictly cooperative Vs orchestrated), and consequently for different kinds of commitment (by role or by reciprocation, free, based on interest or benevolence, etc.), and then for different ways to solve the conflicts, both intraand interagents. For ex. how to intervene when one of the agents decides to abandon the group, or the common plan ? We cannot influence appropriately this agent if we don’t know exactly its kind of commitment and the related different reasons for defection [CAS93a]. 2. Kinds of Commitment: Internal, Social, and Collective We need a notion of Commitment as a mediation between the individual and the collective one. A "social commitment" is not an individual Commitment shared by many agents. In general, it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between the notion of "social" and the notion of "collective". This is not the case in DAI and MAS: for ex. to designate the notion of a goal or intention shared by many agents and that they can not achieve independent of each other, it is used the notion of "social" intention or goal (ex.[WER88]); to designate an agent formed by many individual agents, i.e. a group or a team, it is used the notion of "social agent" (ex. [RAO92]); to denote the idea of reciwocal commitments within a team of agents it is used the notion of "social Commitment" and "social plan". "Social" is not a synonym of"collective". There is a very important level of "social action", "social agent" and "social mind" where action and mind remain "individual" but they are oriented toward another social entity. At this level, before constructing a notion of "collective or group Commitment" we need a notion of "social Commitment": the Commitment of one agent to an other agent. So let me step by step to distinguish among: internal. social, collective Commitments. INTERNAL COMMITMENT (l.Commitment) Internal Commitment --as [BOU92] calls it-corresponds to the Commitment defined by Cohen and Levesque (on the basis of Bramum’s analysis) [COLI90]. It refers to relation between an agent and an action. The agent has decided to do something, the agent is determined to execute a certain action (at the scheduled time), the goal (intention) that was preferred is a persistent one. The way to capture such a persistence is to establish that the intention will be abandoned only if and when the agent believes that the goal has been reached, or that it is impossible, or that it is no longer motivated. The term "Internal" is to be preferred to "Individual" because one may attribute l-Commitments also to a group. The term "psychological ", as opposed to "social", is quite misleading because also the Social and the Collective Commitments are relations among minds. SOCIAL COMMITMENT (S.Commitment) As said above S-Commitment is a relational concept, h expresses a relation between at least two agents. More precisely, S-Commitment is a 4 argument relation: