2Agent-based Modeling of Human Organizations
2.1. Introduction
This section has a narrow spine but a wide embrace. In addressing the relationship between agents and organizations, it takes in an extensive but highly fragmented set of ideas and studies embedded in organization theories. Its purpose is to try to devise a common ground model from which organization theories of various sorts can be logically derived.
Many theories have been developed to explain how organizations are structured and conducted and how the stakeholders involved behave. Each one takes a definite point of view without giving the opportunity to understand how they are possibly correlated with each other and whether a mapping of a sort between some of them can be figured out. On the contrary, founders of new approaches seem in most cases to ignore previous works. Agent ontology can function as a background model, allowing for the derivation of the main organizational theories from this base.
2.2. Concept of agenthood in the technical world
2.2.1. Some words about agents explained
In the technical field, the concept of agenthood is widely used. A general definition of what an agent is has been produced by J. Ferber (1999) (p. 9). Its adaptation is as follows:
Get From Complexity in the Natural Sciences to Complexity in Operations Management Systems now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
