Computational Organization Theory
Kathleen M. Carley · Psychology Press eBooks · 2014
Throughout the history of organization theory there has been an implicit goal of developing an understanding of organizations in terms of the situated action of the agents within them and the position of the organization itself in the larger environment. Weber (1922,1968) sought to understand organizations in terms of the causal relations that shaped the multidimensional phenomenon we refer to as the organization. His approach was a combination of the inspection of “ideal types ” and historical analysis. His work and that of Taylor (1911), Fayol (1949) and others in the scientific management area shaped early work on organizations. Collectively, this early work suggested that a science of organizations could be built around models of the agents in the organization performing organizational tasks. These models could be idealizations of reality, but detailed enough to lend insight into and to be tested against historical data. The task was critical, not just due to goal setting, but also because it affected issues such as requisite skills, timing, level of training, number of personnel, and so forth. Cyert and March’s A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (1963) arose out of this early work on organizations as collections of intelligent agents. Indeed, Cyert and March (1963) stands as a landmark for organizational theorists interested in formal models. Their work demonstrated the organizational impacts of bounded rationality and the value of process models for organization theory. Cyert and