ADVENTURES IN SOFTWARE ARCHEOLOGY: SEEKING (ABTOF) THEORY IN THE CODE.
Michael J. Prietula, Mie Augier · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2005
A Behavioral Theory of the Firm by James March and Richard Cyert is one of the most influential works in organizational science. An interesting and important element of that work was a computational model of a duopoly, which was eliminated in the second edition of the book. We examine the structure of the model and illustrate how the theoretical constructs were implemented: organizational attention, organizational learning, organizational memory, routines and meta-routines, and computational experiments. We also explore the academic environment within which this theory and model grew. We suggest that an interesting question is why the theory had a distinctly greater impact than the method on organizational research and education.