Many business organizations seem to be doing everything but making ethical organizational decisions these days. In stark contrast, social enterprises are organizations that operate as businesses but are altruistic, humanitarian, and seek the goal of creating social value in effective, efficient and ethical ways. This paper applies principles of social enterprises to develop a multi-perspective ...

In this paper we propose a foundational ontology of the social concepts of organization and role which structure institutions. We identify which axioms model social concepts like organization and roles and which properties distinguish them from other categories like objects and agents: the organizational structure of institutions and the relation between roles and organizations. All social conc...

We identify the “organization” of a human social group as the communication network(s) within that group. We then introduce three theoretical approaches to analyzing what determines the structures of human organizations. All three approaches adopt a group-selection perspective, so that the group’s network structure is (approximately) optimal, given the information-processing limitations of agen...

Software development is a predominantly social activity. It is important to view software development groups, departments, and corporations as social bodies. We study software organizations by using a novel data-gathering approach that combines several techniques commonly used in social network analysis. We differ from ordinary social anthropology in that we help the organization introspect abo...

Although social institutions permeate the world in which we live, they are all but absent from our analyses of economic growth and development. This paper argues the need to mitigate this omission by demonstrating the importance of social institutions for growth and development while focusing on institutions providing social safety nets. Social institutions and policies render individual behavi...

This paper extends theories of control as an organization design tool and empirically explores the efficacy of delegation technologies in providing the equivalent of social (clan) control for effort-averse agents engaged in low programmable, low outcome measurement task environments. The exploratory evaluation of delegation technologies suggests new control alternatives that are trust building ...

The coordination in open multi-agent systems is difficult to achieve, mainly because agents are autonomous. Social commitments have been proposed as a new coordination paradigm, suitable to describe agent communications or interactions. As some authors have pointed out, commitment enforcement is necessary, i.e., autonomous agents that violate commitments must be punished. In related work this i...

ii Acknowledgements The research team would like to acknowledge Dr. Tao Sun of the department of Community Development and Applied Economics at the University of Vermont for his significant contribution helping to design this project, build the survey, analyze the data, and co-author academic papers on the findings. We also want to thank University of Vermont professor Curt Ventriss of the Rube...

■ Abstract Research on organizations is increasingly informed by analysis of community context. Community can be conceptualized as sets of relations between organizational forms or as places where organizations are located in resource space or in geography. In both modes, organizations operate interdependently with social institutions and with other units of social structure. Because such relat...

The authors present a research based in Spain and carried out between 2011 and 2014 on the social organizations and affective processes involved in social movements. Using extracts from narrative interviews, they explore how participants in social protests cross attachment and technology in order to develop trusting relationships. The way they propose to analyse the issue of trust in social org...