Supporting Virtual Enterprise Systems Using Agent Coordination

International audienceOpen environments like the Internet or corporate intranets enable a large number of interested enterprises to access, filter, process, and present information on an as-needed basis. These environments support modern applications, such as virtual enterprises and inter-organizational workflow management systems, which involve a number of heterogeneous resources, services, and processes. However, any execution of a virtual enterprise system would yield to disjoining and error-prone behavior without appropriate techniques to coordinate the various business processes. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a flexible agent-based framework for supporting the coordination of virtual enterprises and workflow management systems. The paper also shows how an agent coordination infrastructure, which is explained by social constraints, can impact on the engineering of highly dynamic virtual enterprises and workflow management systems by presenting a simple case study

Contracting with General Dental Services: a mixed-methods study on factors influencing responses to contracts in English general dental practice

Background: Independent contractor status of NHS general dental practitioners (GDPs) and general medical practitioners (GMPs) has meant that both groups have commercial as well as professional identities. Their relationship with the state is governed by a NHS contract, the terms of which have been the focus of much negotiation and struggle in recent years. Previous study of dental contracting has taken a classical economics perspective, viewing practitioners’ behaviour as a fully rational search for contract loopholes. We apply institutional theory to this context for the first time, where individuals’ behaviour is understood as being influenced by wider institutional forces such as growing consumer demands, commercial pressures and challenges to medical professionalism. Practitioners hold values and beliefs, and carry out routines and practices which are consistent with the field’s institutional logics. By identifying institutional logics in the dental practice organisational field, we expose where tensions exist, helping to explain why contracting appears as a continual cycle of reform and resistance. Aims: To identify the factors which facilitate and hinder the use of contractual processes to manage and strategically develop General Dental Services, using a comparison with medical practice to highlight factors which are particular to NHS dental practice. Methods: Following a systematic review of health-care contracting theory and interviews with stakeholders, we undertook case studies of 16 dental and six medical practices. Case study data collection involved interviews, observation and documentary evidence; 120 interviews were undertaken in all. We tested and refined our findings using a questionnaire to GDPs and further interviews with commissioners. Results: We found that, for all three sets of actors (GDPs, GMPs, commissioners), multiple logics exist. These were interacting and sometimes in competition. We found an emergent logic of population health managerialism in dental practice, which is less compatible than the other dental practice logics of ownership responsibility, professional clinical values and entrepreneurialism. This was in contrast to medical practice, where we found a more ready acceptance of external accountability and notions of the delivery of ‘cost-effective’ care. Our quantitative work enabled us to refine and test our conceptualisations of dental practice logics. We identified that population health managerialism comprised both a logic of managerialism and a public goods logic, and that practitioners might be resistant to one and not the other. We also linked individual practitioners’ behaviour to wider institutional forces by showing that logics were predictive of responses to NHS dental contracts at the dental chair-side (the micro level), as well as predictive of approaches to wider contractual relationships with commissioners (the macro level) . Conclusions: Responses to contracts can be shaped by environmental forces and not just determined at the level of the individual. In NHS medical practice, goals are more closely aligned with commissioning goals than in general dental practice. The optimal contractual agreement between GDPs and commissioners, therefore, will be one which aims at the ‘satisfactory’ rather than the ‘ideal’; and a ‘successful’ NHS dental contract is likely to be one where neither party promotes its self-interest above the other. Future work on opportunism in health care should widen its focus beyond the self-interest of providers and look at the contribution of contextual factors such as the relationship between the government and professional bodies, the role of the media, and providers’ social and professional networks. Funding: The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme

TEAMLOG in Action:a Case Study in Teamwork

This article presents a case study of a theoretical multi-agent system designed to clean up ecological disasters. It focuses on the interactions within a heterogeneous team of agents, outlines their goals and plans, and establishes the necessary distribution of information and commitment throughout the team, including its sub-teams. These aspects of teamwork are presented in the TEAMLOG formalism [20], based on multi-modal logic, in which collective informational and motivational attitudes are first-class citizens. Complex team attitudes are justified to be necessary in the course of teamwork. The article shows how to make a bridge between theoretical foundations of TEAMLOG and an application and illustrates how to tune TEAMLOG to the case study by establishing sufficient, but still minimal levels for the team attitudes

TO ROW TOGETHER OR PADDLE ONE\u27S OWN CANOE? SIMULATING STRATEGIES TO SPUR DIGITAL PLATFORM GROWTH

This study provides a novel perspective on digital platform dynamics by applying a stochastic cellular automaton (CA) as a promising instrument of inquiry to investigate the impact of social and technical openness on platform growth. Owing to the dynamism of digital platforms caused by technological complexity, network effects, and developer-level factors, there is limited under-standing of how early-stage platform owners can successfully sustain platform growth. Research suggests two growth strategies: Adjusting the openness of technical platform resources and gov-erning the developers’ accessibility of the distribution channel. Based on experiments that lev-erage a stochastic CA, we show that platform growth can be achieved through three disparate growth strategy configurations. Our paper contributes to research by synthesizing the technolo-gy, market, and individual levels of platform growth analyses through a novel methodological account, and by offering theoretical propositions for future research. Our results can guide platform owners to scrutinize their growth strategies

Computational accountability in MAS organizations with ADOPT

This work studies how the notion of accountability can play a key role in the design and realization of distributed systems that are open and that involve autonomous agents that should harmonize their own goals with the organizational goals. The socio–technical systems that support the work inside human companies and organizations are examples of such systems. The approach that is proposed in order to pursue this purpose is set in the context of multiagent systems organizations, and relies on an explicit specification of relationships among the involved agents for capturing who is accountable to whom and for what. Such accountability relationships are created along with the agents’ operations and interactions in a shared environment. In order to guarantee accountability as a design property of the system, a specific interaction protocol is suggested. Properties of this protocol are verified, and a case study is provided consisting of an actual implementation. Finally, we discuss the impact on real-world application domains and trace possible evolutions of the proposal

The Value of Trust in Construction Supply Chains

Abstract Construction supply chains have a high level of specialism and involve loosely-coupled and relatively self-contained subsystems. Value is always co-created in networks of relationships. Effective relationships between those representing their respective organisations in the project are necessary for effective integration and healthy interdependencies to grow and be maintained. Relationships in construction supply chains have been featured as transactional and do not always generate effective working. Collaboration has been repeatedly proposed to counteract these trends and trust has been identified as a key success indicator. Yet less research interest has been in trust dynamically co-created through service interactions and levering value for those involved. This thesis aims to demonstrate the dynamic value of trust in construction supply chains, in particular relationships between main contractors and second-tier subcontractors, an under-researched area by supply chain and project management bodies of knowledge (BoKs). Taking the perspective of structuration theory and service- dominant logic (S-DL), this process-based research focuses on supply chain relationships in service ecosystems. Seventy-one semi-structured interviews were conducted at the preconstruction, then execution and finally completion stage of three construction projects. The findings reveal that trust development is both an intended and unintended process and involves various types of interaction. It is found that the interplay between different types of interactions can form the trust phenomenon in which the value of trust unfolds. Trust helps increase service value by improving the service experiences of those involved; the better service enables higher performance levels. The study also demonstrates the conditions for trust in terms of structures of service ecosystems and time. This study contributes to knowledge in that it 1) theoretically and empirically demonstrates the value of trust and relationship in construction project management and supply chain disciplines, 2) advances the relational approach in both disciplines and 3) links trust and relational concepts with S-DL

Developing SMEs through large firm-small firm linkages

This thesis aims to explore the prospects for small and medium enterprise (SME) development using inter-finn linkages between large and small finns in Kenya A wide range of strategies has been adopted already for the development of small enterprises globally, but limited use appears to have been made, outside Japan, of inter-finn linkages as a specific strategy. Despite the recent global movement towards inter-finn relationships as a strategy for achieving efficiency through the down-sizing of large finns, externalisation of activities, and adoption of lean production techniques, no attempt appears to have been made to use the strategy for SME development, possibly because little is known about how inter-finn linkages between large and small .finns are fonned. This thesis aims to con1ribute to the development of this understanding by using an inductive, qualitative research approach to explore the fuctors influencing the sourcing strategies of large finns in Kenya, to detennine whether these have some potential for SME development both in the country and more generally. The study focuses on the Kenyan vehicle assembly industry and examines, through in-depth case studies, the sourcing activities of three vehicle assembly plants and four franchise holders. Overnll, the research lends support to the argument that for various reasons largely related to m.arlcet failure, and a non-conducive business environment, large firms in Kenya's motor vehicle industIy are reluctant to outsource voluntarily from local small finns, and that when they do, relations appear to be arms-length and adversarial. The research also reveals that in the Kenyan environment, contrary to the arguments of transaction cost theory, outsourcing decisions are predicated on the need to comply with compulsory regulations in order to gain access to resources and m.arlcets, rather -than primarily on cost minimisation. Consequently, strategies which assure access to resources such as foreign exchange and impo.rt licenses were found to override purely efficiency considerations. The findings imply that although there are some prospects for SME development using this approach, the selection of small enterprises as suppliers by managers of large firms is limited by large firms' perceptions of the suitability of such suppliers, and that if SME development is to take place through such linkages, strategies which either change the image of small suppliers, or improve the attitudes oflarge buyers have to be adopted

Managerial moral agency and wider institutional factors in the enactment of workplace safety practices

The apparel production industry has become a springboard for economic growth and is the typical starter industry in several low-income, highly populated developing nations. This study was focused on the apparel factories located in Bangladesh—an emerging nation of the Global South where the apparel industry has recently faced a severe image crisis and has become the subject of great concern due to its substandard working conditions and safety violations. Hence, it has become a matter of urgency for such sector to undergo a workplace safety makeover suited to deal with this unnerving situation and to gain and strengthen consumer confidence, which is crucial to building a more reliable ‘manufacturer-retailerconsumer’ relationship. The extant literature has adequately addressed factory working conditions and workplace safety issues, thus aiding our understanding of the reasons that have led to accidents and their adverse effect on the people involved in the sector. However, these studies have stopped short of shedding light on the aspect of the attitudes that lead supplier factory managers to behave in a certain manner—i.e., engage in compliance or avoidance of safety provisions. Therefore, this study sought to both theoretically and empirically understand such managers’ moral agency in relation to workplace safety practices and how wider institutional factors can influence managerial attitudes towards safety. The fieldwork was conducted in Bangladesh, collecting qualitative data mainly by conducting semi-structured interviews. The interviews were supported and validated by data collected from non-participant observations. The data were then subjected to thematic analysis. Bandura’s moral disengagement theoretical lens was adopted for this investigation. The empirical findings revealed some interesting and unique wider institutional factors that significantly influence and shape managerial moral agency towards safety. While Bandura’s moral disengagement theory appears to be capable of capturing immoral behaviour at the individual level, it shows its limitations to do so in a collective construct, as was evidenced in this study. Therefore, a moral agency spectrum consisting of four salient agency types is proposed as an extension of the theory in order to investigate moral agency in social and organisational settings. This study makes several empirical contributions to knowledge. It provides insights into the business ethics literature in applying the concept of moral agency in the investigation of safety practices in apparel factories of global supply chains. document. In the process, it documents the lived experiences of individual actors embedded in the supply chain network and contributes to our understanding of the potential causes of the apparel industry’s poor safety records which carries policy implications

Modes of mobilisation : socio-political dynamics in Somaliland, Somalia, and Afghanistan

This thesis provides a framework for viewing socio-political contexts and how these relate to interventionist projects. The framework draws on and combines strands from international relations and sociological perspectives of social interaction. The central question becomes how intervention and existing social contexts interact to produce unintended outcomes. It applies the analysis to two separate wider contexts: Afghanistan and Somalia, with a particular focus on the self-declared independent Somaliland as an internally generated and controlled transformational process. Unlike abstract directions of theoretical development the framework seeks to provide a platform that sets aside ideological assumptions and from which interventionist projects can be observed and evaluated based on literature, field observations and interviews. Drawing on such diverse influences as fourth generation peace and conflict studies, Morphogenetics, and social forces theory, the framework explores conditions and interest formations to capture instances of local agency that are part of a continuity of local realities. It views social interaction without imposing Universalist value assumptions, but also without resorting to relativism or raising so many caveats that it becomes impractical. It exposes the agency of local interest formations hidden beneath the discourses of ideologically framed conflicts. These social agents are often dismissed as passive victims to be brought under the influence of for example the state, but are in reality able to subvert, co-opt, constrain or facilitate the forces that are dependent on them for social influence. In the end, it is the modes of mobilisation that emerge as the most crucial factor for understanding the relevant social dynamics