Constructing Agent-Based Models of Organizational Routines

Abstract

Organizational routines represent a form of organizational behavior currently studied in multifarious scientific domains, such as economics, organization science, sociology, and psychology. The diverse perspectives on this phenomenon produce a plethora of models reflecting, for instance, what a routine is and how it emerges from and changes within a socio-technical system. Newcomers to the topic of organizational routines may be easily confused by this substantial scientific diversity, discovering many maps for seemingly the same territory. This chapter presents descriptors to facilitate the comparison of work on organizational routines, and applies them to a contemporary method employed to investigate the phe- nomenon: agent-based modeling. This insight is related to technical issues relevant to simulating organizational routines, such as model design, implementation, and validation.