The Development of Social Simulation as Reflected in the First Ten Years of JASSS: a Citation and Co-Citation Analysis

Social simulation is often described as a multidisciplinary and fast-moving field. This can make it difficult to obtain an overview of the field both for contributing researchers and for outsiders who are interested in social simulation. The Journal for Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) completing its tenth year provides a good opportunity to take stock of what happened over this time period. First, we use citation analysis to identify the most influential publications and to verify characteristics of social simulation such as its multidisciplinary nature. Then, we perform a co-citation analysis to visualize the intellectual structure of social simulation and its development. Overall, the analysis shows social simulation both in its early stage and during its first steps towards becoming a more differentiated discipline.Citation Analysis, Co-Citation Analysis, Lines of Research, Multidisciplinary, Science Studies, Social Simulation

Simulating activities: Relating motives, deliberation, and attentive coordination

Activities are located behaviors, taking time, conceived as socially meaningful, and usually involving interaction with tools and the environment. In modeling human cognition as a form of problem solving (goal-directed search and operator sequencing), cognitive science researchers have not adequately studied “off-task” activities (e.g., waiting), non-intellectual motives (e.g., hunger), sustaining a goal state (e.g., playful interaction), and coupled perceptual-motor dynamics (e.g., following someone). These aspects of human behavior have been considered in bits and pieces in past research, identified as scripts, human factors, behavior settings, ensemble, flow experience, and situated action. More broadly, activity theory provides a comprehensive framework relating motives, goals, and operations. This paper ties these ideas together, using examples from work life in a Canadian High Arctic research station. The emphasis is on simulating human behavior as it naturally occurs, such that “working” is understood as an aspect of living. The result is a synthesis of previously unrelated analytic perspectives and a broader appreciation of the nature of human cognition. Simulating activities in this comprehensive way is useful for understanding work practice, promoting learning, and designing better tools, including human-robot systems

The Emergence of Leader-Society Value Congruence: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Previous research on cross-cultural leadership has focused on the outcomes associated with leadership factors consistent with national cultural values without exploring how leaders’ individual cultural orientations become congruent with the societal culture in different national settings. The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of how leader-society value congruence is produced and how the degree of such congruency varies across cultures. This paper conceptually clarifies the mechanisms that mediate the influence of cultural context on leader-society value congruence; suggests that the effects of societal context are only distal antecedents of producing congruence between leaders’ individual and societal level cultural values; and concludes that their effects are manifest via their impact on self-construal and communication patterns

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Determinants of social and institutional beliefs about internet acceptance within developing country’s context: A structural evaluation of higher education systems in Pakistan

This study aims to extend a model of technology acceptance to suit in developing country’s context. The model attempts to identify relationship between social and institutional factors over behavioural intention and usage. Recently, ‘acceptance and adoption of information technology (IT) in multicultural setting’ is becoming topic of interest for IS researchers. In this line, numerous theories and models are proposed to contribute in examining factors of IT acceptance and reluctance. It is argued that the models in published literature are found culturally biased, which successfully present results in only American and European context, however, their validity became questionable when they were tested in south Asian countries context. Additionally, lack of research is observed to predict individual’s cognitive behaviour of acceptance, which are influenced by social factors (i.e. peer influence and superior influence, voluntariness, experience) and institutional factors (i.e. local institutional management influence and top-level governmental policies influence). This study used Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) based on Partial Least Square (PLS) method to analyse the data. The results reveal that the proposed conceptual model achieves acceptable fit and the hypothesised paths are valid