7 Computational Organization Theory

From the hospital, to the schoolroom, to the boardroom people nd that the actions they take aect and are aaected by v arious organizations, and the norms, procedures , culture, and members of those organizations. In order to navigate through an organizational world, agents (human and artiicial) need social and organizational intelligence. This organizational intelligence comprises many dimensions, including communication capabilities, knowledge about who knows what, knowledge about norms, procedures, and culture of the organization, and more. The ability of an organization to act is certainly dependent on the intelligence of the agents within it. However, organizations, and multi-agent systems in general, often show a n i n telligence and a set of capabilities that are distinct from the intelligence and capabilities of the agents within the system. It is not diicult to nd multi-agent systems that display non-random and repeated patterns and processes of action, communication, knowledge, and memory (beyond the lifetime of a single agent) regardless of whether or not the agents are humann i.e., multi-agent systems exhibit an internal organizational design. Such designs can structure activities and attention within the system, control the actions of the system as a corporate entity, and may emerge spontaneously or be imposed. From country to country, culture to culture, task to task, and agent t ype to agent t ype, we nd both diierences and commonalties in the designs of organizations, in the patterns and processes connecting individual agents. In order to navigate through this environment a n d a c hieve results not achievable by individual agents, or to exhibit capabilities not held by individual agents, organizations and indeed all multi-agent systems, need to act as intelligent information processors, capable of acting as a single corporate entity, and to coordinate individual agents using some type of organizing principle or design. Research in the computational organization area employs computational techniques to theorize about and analyze organizations and the processes of organizing. The goal of this chapter is to describe what can be done and what others have done in this area: the underlying principles, assumptions, and concerns, and