Responsibilities in Organizations

This paper addresses the issue of responsibilities within organizations of agents. The main aim of the research is to provide a formal analysis of the connections between collective obligations to individual responsibilities. Which individual agent in a group should be held responsible if an obligation directed to the whole group is not fulfilled? To this aim, concepts from planning literature (like plan and task allocation) and organization theory are used in order to conceptualize collective agency and the organizational structures. These concepts are formalized in a dynamic deontic logic framework, which allows us to study the connections between all these concepts. We will give a formal account of the notion of coordination, power and control intended as management of interdependencies among agents’ activities and show how these organizational relations together with a specific task decomposition determine the responsibilities within an organization.