Abstract
The work of the book that follows began because of a problem: a group of professionals (Spanish junior judges) needed to improve the conditions under which they had to make their decisions. So far a great deal of research effort (Casanovas et al. 2003; Benjamins et al. 2004a, 2005; Casanovas et al. 2005a, 2006a; Casellas et al. 2007) has been devoted to show and test that a solution to this problem might come through the design and application of an artificial intelligent device that helped in their decision-making process.
However, the aim of the present work is not to focus upon the process of building a system designed to support decision-making, but to explore whether and why such a decisional, organizational problem existed, and how it could be detected and represented. In other words, our objective is to explore what makes specially problematic this decision-making process by Spanish junior judges, and eventually why should an intelligent device may help them. This way we expect to better understand the role of organizations in making decisions.
In this introduction we shall start contextualizing our work. We then proceed briefly outlining the empirical background that surrounds our research. Thirdly we will introduce the artificial decision-support system we mentioned: its main features and the kind of research it implied. Fourthly we give a brief account of the theoretical scope of this book within the general field of decision-making within organizations. Finally, the work to be carried out in this book is presented. First, we introduce its basic hypotheses and assumptions. Second, its structure is outlined.
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- 1.
Justices of the Peace exist also at the local level. In fact, they are in municipalities without Courts of First Instance and Magistrate, and are filled with lay judges or magistrates who do not belong to the same administrative civil service as regular judges. Actually, these magistrates of the Peace are appointed by local governments themselves, and unlike judges a law degree is not required for them. In a sense, they are thought of as a first instance for citizen conflict resolution for minor civil issues.
- 2.
Judicial statistics in Spain have a qualified tradition that began with the end of Franco’s authoritarian regime (1975) and the approval of a democratic constitution in 1978. Since 1984, the General Council of the Judiciary (the agency that rules the Spanish judges) has been carrying out nine in-depth opinion surveys among the Spanish population about the administration of justice, and seven internal surveys among Spanish judges. See Toharia Cortés and García de la Cruz Herrero (2005) for a quick review.
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The Observatory of Judicial Culture (SEC2001-2581-C02-01, Ministry of Science and Technology) results from a coordinate project between the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), the University of Barcelona (UB), the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Intelligent Software Components (iSOCO) and the board of directors of the Spanish Judicial School.
- 6.
Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies, EU-IST Project IST-2003-506826 SEKT, www.sekt-project.org.
- 7.
Herbert Simon revised and published four editions of Administrative Behavior, of which only the third and fourth ones implied major changes to the original work (the second edition of 1957 may be considered a reprint). In the third edition Simon (1976) kept intact the first 11 chapters of the original edition (grouping them as part I of the new book) and added a second part which included 6 new chapters based on the author’s previously published work on the theory of administration. Eleven years afterwards, Simon revised the book and produced a fourth and last edition (Simon 1997). For this new edition the author kept the original 11 chapters intact again, but changed the structure of the book compared to the third edition. Instead of adding more updated material to the third edition’s second part, Simon opted for removing that entire part and producing a commentary for each of the original 11 chapters of Administrative Behavior, which implied a considerable updating effort (each commentary includes completely updated references). In order to stress out the historical moment in which several ideas where firstly pointed out, we shall cite the three editions distinctly throughout the book.
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Vallbé, JJ. (2015). Introduction. In: Frameworks for Modeling Cognition and Decisions in Institutional Environments. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9427-5_1
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