A variety of disciplines and research areas have separately studied the notions of action, agents and agency, but no integrated and well-developed formal ontology for them is currently available. This paper is a first attempt at bridging this gap, focusing especially on the relationship between agency and action. The departure point is STIT logic, the most expressive among the current logics of...

Purpose – This paper aims to develop a new socio-cognitive theory of the normative personality of a plural agency like, for instance, an organisation or a political system. This cybernetic agency theory is connected to Bandura’s theory of psychosocial function. The agency is adaptive and has a normative personality that operates through three formative personality traits, the function of which ...

Cloud computing is a new and increasingly popular form of IT outsourcing. It implies that a cloud service provider offers very standardized abstract IT services which are accessed by a user over the Internet. While cloud services are supposed to be very beneficial for small and medium-sized enterprises, the adoption of such services has been low in this group, among other reasons because of hig...