Description
The definition of organization has been updated and improved over the past hundred years.
Daft and Armstrong (2007) treated organization as a goaldirected social entity that is designed as a deliberately structured and coordinated dynamic system connecting with the external environment. An organization cannot thrive without successful and powerful traits. Faced with threats and chances, it should be sensitive to external changes and keep adapting and learning (Hannah and Lester, 2009). Learning is not limited to the scope of knowledge per se but a “problem-oriented action” or “knowing” (Kuhn and Jackson, 2008). Roberts (2007) discussed contemporary organization by summarizing several influential books and has managed to address relevant problems. Rashman et al. (2009) reviewed the literature on organizational learning and knowledge relevant with public organizations particularly, and maintained their uniqueness by using the dynamic model. The external situations in the environment are also vital issues. Analyzing the community context will revitalize the research on organizations (Freeman and Audia, 2006), since organizations function with other social units interdependently. King et al. (2010) noted that we should locate the organization in a wider social landscape and then explore its uniqueness as a social actor.
In addition to external conditions, internal components are important. An organization cannot survive or exist without rational structure and design of the system. Rank (2008) argued that although considerable researches aim at unveiling the complicated function of organizational systems, little attention has been given to the “structural interdependencies between formal organizations and informal networks.”
Santos and Eisenhardt (2005) stressed organizational boundaries, which may facilitate the understanding of organizations. Kulic and Baker (2008) also held that it was difficult to draw boundaries clearly under real-world situations. As a response, they proposed another method to cover various views of organizations in a simulative environment using computational organizational theory.
Organization can be classified into two basic categories, i.e., selforganization and external-organization (Zhang, 2013). Major difference between the two categories of organizations is whether the organizational instructions/forces come from outside the system or from inside the system. The organization with organizational instructions/ forces from inside the system is called self-organization.
Contents
Preface vii
Chapter 1 Organization and Organizational Theory 1
Chapter 2 Selforganizology: The Science of Self-organization 13
Chapter 3 Agent-based Modeling 47
Chapter 4 Intelligence Principles 71
Chapter 5 Catastrophe Theory and Methods 83
Chapter 6 Self-adaptation and Control Systems 97
Chapter 7 Cellular Automata and Spatial Diffusion Models 137
Chapter 8 Artificial Neural Networks 159
Chapter 9 Ant Colony Optimization 187
Chapter 10 Fish and Particle Swarm Optimization 209
Chapter 11 Synergy, Coevolution, and Evolutionary Algorithms 217
Chapter 12 Synergy: Correlation Analysis 233
Chapter 13 Community Succession and Assembly 253
Chapter 14 Mathematical Foundations 297
References 357
Index 387