Interaction Topologies and Organizational Cognition
Pietro Panzarasa
pp@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Recent advances in distributed artificial intelligence,
social networks, cognitive sciences, and organization theory have led to
a new perspective on organizations that takes into account both their computational
nature and the underlying social and knowledge networks. The hallmark of
this perspective is the idea that cognition occurs at multiple levels, not
only within the individual agent, but also as an emergent phenomenon from
the interaction among multiple agents. The new insight is that if relationships
connecting bits of cognition can extend among agents, then the ways in which
agents interact with one another are likely to impact on the emergent global
cognitive phenomena. This is a topic that is directly
relevant to the social sciences: the role of social structure in generating
global dynamical features. This paper offers a more specific way to cast
the issue at hand. Firstly, we identify a meaningful set of structural parameters
that can significantly affect the cognitive dynamics of organizations. Secondly,
we go on to treat the global cognitive properties of organizations explicitly
as a function of the underlying social networks. Differences both in cognitive
processes and in joint mental attitudes may depend on such features of the
interaction topology as its sparseness, connectedness, centrality, local
clustering and global
separation. Likewise, significant changes in global cognitive phenomena can
also result from perturbations to the local structure that are likely to
impact on the globally emergent structure. Furthermore, admixtures of randomness
to an otherwise ordered social network can have a significant impact on its
cognitive properties. This paper will address these problems by proposing
a computational agent-based model of organizations based on the thesis that
cognitive architectures can cut across multiple agents. Using this model,
we will show how it is possible to take some steps towards a new account
of the structural foundations of organizational cognition.