Computational Organization Research

A growing collection of communities worldwide is researching phenomena of human organizations using computational methods. There are pressing research issues in both the development and ongoing operations of organizations, and in organization theory and analysis, that are highly amenable to techniques for computational modeling, theory-building/testing, and experimentation. This short note is intended to provide a quick orientation and perspective on compmtafional ory~nization research, a phenomenon and problematic that has been the focus of this emerging research community, both within and outside of AI, DAI, and multiagent systems arenas. Organizations and organization-level phenomena are already ubiquitous in modern life. New technologies and new social and institutional arrangements are emerging rapidly, changing our notions of what it means to be organized, how best to organize, how to form, change and stabilize organizations, and so on. The rapidity of these changes, and the growing body of information and knowledge involved in the functional and representational processes of modern organizations, mean that new methods, mechanisms, and theories are needed. Particularly computational methods may provide several advantages for studying and enhancing some kinds of organizational phenomena: