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The Emergence of Organizational Structures

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Design Models for Hierarchical Organizations

Abstract

In this paper we present results which show how organizational structures can emerge from the iteration of simple rules of local interaction among individual agents in the absence of any central coordination. In this framework, agents are seen as local information processing units performing a complex collective computation simply by responding to the structure of their immediate neighborhood without knowing how much they contribute to the solution of the global organizational problem. In the context of voting games, a series of computer simulations is performed to illustrate how changes in initial conditions, memory structures, and voting rules affect the overall dynamics of the organizational system. The key insight of the analysis is that the emergence of highly regular organizational structures can be observed despite the complete parallelization of the planning problem.

A previous version of this paper was presented at the EIASM Workshop on Mathematical Models of Organizational Design, Brusssels March 1994. We thank Erik Mosekilde, John Freeman, David Krackhardt, Martin Kilduff and Nigel Nicholson for their comments on earlier versions of the paper. We extend our gratitude to Richard Burton and Børge Obel for their encouragement, and the participants of the EIASM workshop for their insightful criticism. This work has been partially supported by a research grant from the Danish Social Science Research Council for a project on Computational Organizational Theory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. London Business School, Regent's Park Sussex Place, London, NW1 4SA, UK

    Alessandro Lomi & Erik R. Larsen

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  1. Alessandro Lomi
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  2. Erik R. Larsen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Richard M. Burton

  2. Department of Management, Odense University, Odense, Denmark

    Børge Obel

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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Lomi, A., Larsen, E.R. (1995). The Emergence of Organizational Structures. In: Burton, R.M., Obel, B. (eds) Design Models for Hierarchical Organizations. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2285-0_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2285-0_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-5964-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-2285-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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