Toward Formal Representations of Search Processes and Routines in Organizational Problem Solving : An Assessment of the State-of-The-Art

This paper presents a critical overview of some recent attempts at building formal models of organizations as information-processing and problem-solving entities. We distinguish between two classes of models according to two distinct objects of analysis. The first class includes models mainly addressing information processing and learning; the second class includes models focusing upon the relationship between the division of cognitive labor and search process in some problem-solving space. The results begin to highlight important comparative properties regarding the impact on problem-solving efficiency and learning of different forms of hierarchical governance, the dangers of lock-in associated with specific forms of adaptive learning, the relative role of 'online' vs. 'offline' learning, the impact of the 'cognitive maps' which organizations embody, the possible trade-offs between accuracy and speed of convergence associated with different 'decomposition schemes,' the (ambiguous) role of organizational memory in changing environments