Faculty Details

Biography

Professor Carley's research centers around areas of social, organizational, knowledge and information networks, organizational design, change, adaptivity and and performance, computational organization theory, crisis management, social theory, impacts on information diffusion of changes in social policy and changes in communication technology, and mapping experts and executives knowledge networks using textual analysis techniques. Her current projects include: utilization of multi-agent computational models to examine various issues related to organizational design, adaptivity, performance, and technology transfer, examining how social networks, knowledge networks, and information networks interact to influence the emergence of groups, the rate of information diffusion, and the development of social consensus in areas such as team management, information security, and drug networks.; encoding mental models from texts; and development of computational and statistical techniques for analysis of network evolution.

Publications

Books

Simulating Organizations: Computational Models of Institutions and Groups, (Michael Prietula, Kathleen Carley and Les Gasser, eds.), Boston, MA: AAAI Press/The MIT Press, forthcoming.

Advanced Qualitative Methods in the Study of Human Behavior: Computer Supported Analysis of Case Studies, (with Robert W. Lawler); Ablex, Norwood, New Jersey, 1996.

Articles

"Network Structure in Virtual Organizations" (with Manju Ahuja), Organizations Science and JCMC, forthcoming.

"Emotions in Crisis Management: An Analysis of Organizational Response to Two natural Disasters" (with Ruth Cohen, John R. Harrald, and William A. Wallace), International Journal of Technology Management, forthcoming.

"Exploring the Effects of Agent Trust and Benevolence in a Simulated Organizational Task" (with Michael Prietula), Applied Artificial Intelligence, forthcoming.

"Agents, Trust, and Organizational Behavior" (with Michael Prietula); Socially Intelligent Agents: Papers from the 1997 AAAI Fall Symposium, Technical Report FS 97-02, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, forthcoming.

"WebBots, Trust, and Organizational Science" (with Michael Prietula); Simulating Organizations: Computational Models of Institutions and Groups, (Michael Prietula, Kathleen Carley &Les Gasser, eds.), Boston, MA: AAAI Press/The MIT Press, forthcoming.

"Asymmetric Friendships: A Socio-Cognitive Examination of Asymmetric Relationships" (with David Krackhardt); Social Networks, forthcoming.

"Organization and Individual Decision Making," Handbook of Systems Engineering and Management, (S.P. &W.B. Rouse, eds.), John Wiley and Sons, Inc., forthcoming.

"A Theoretical Study of Organizational Performance under Information Distortion" (with Zhiang Lin); Management Science, forthcoming.

"Organizational Performance, Coordination and Cognition" (Olson, G., Malone, T., &Smith, J. Eds); Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, forthcoming.

"Constraint Based Adaptation," (M. Lee, ed.) Chaos, Complexity and Society, Sage, forthcoming.

"Design versus Cognition: The Interaction of Agent Cognition and Organizational Design on Organizational Performance" (with Michael J. Prietula and Zhiang Lin); (R. Conte and E. Chattoe, eds.), Evolving Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Systems, forthcoming.

"The Pothole Lake Fire: An Analysis f Emotion in a Successful Emergency Response" (with Ruth Cohen, Laurie Waisel, and William A. Wallace), Safety Science, Vol. 30, pp. 183-207, 1998.

"Organizational Adaptation," Annals of Operations Research, Vol. 75, pp. 25-47, 1998.

"Introduction: Computational Organization Theory," Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 91-93, 1997.

"Organizations and Constraint Based Adaptation," Chaos, Complexity and Sociology: Myths, Models and Theories, (Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall &Mary E. Lee, eds.), Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 229-242, 1997.

"Organizational Decision making and Error in a Dynamic Task Environment" (with Zhiang Lin); Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 125-150, 1997.

"C2 Adaptation in a Changing Environment" (with Ju-Sung Lee); International Symposium on Command and Control Research and Technology, Washington, DC, 1997.

"Organizational Learning Under Fire: Theory and Practice" (with John Harrald); American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 310-332, 1997.

"Network Text Analysis: The Network Position of Concepts," Texts Analysis for the Social Sciences: Methods for Drawing Statistical Inferences from Texts and Transcripts (C. Roberts, ed.), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 79-100, 1997.

"Two Applications of Automated Text Analysis: Analyzing Literary and Non-Literary Texts," Text Analysis for the Social Science: Methods for Drawing Statistical Inferences from Texts and Transcripts (C. Roberts, ed.), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 171-189, 1997.

"Comment: The Importance of Order," Sociological Methodology, Vol. 5, 1997.

"Organizational Response: The Cost Performance Tradeoff" (with Zhiang Lin); Management Science, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 217-234, 1997.

"Organizational Adaptation and Cognition," Cognitive Science Proceedings, Stanford, CA, 1997.

"Extending Team Mental Models Through Textual Analysis," Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 18, pp. 533-538, 1997.

"An Algorithmic Approach to the Comparison of Partially Labeled Graphs" (with Carter Butts); Proceedings of the 1997 International Symposium on Command and Control Research and Technology, Washington, DC, 1997.

"Cognitive Inconsistencies and Non-Symmetric Friendship" (with David Krackhardt); Social Networks, Vol. 18, pp. 1-27, 1996.

"The Influence of Print on Social and Cultural Change" (with David S. Kaufer); Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Vol. 16, pp. 14-25, 1996.

"A Comparison of Artificial and Human Organizations," Journal of Economics Behavior and Organization, Vol. 31, pp. 175-191, 1996.

"Models of Social Network Revolution" (with David Banks); Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 1-2, pp. 173-196, 1996.

"Communicating New Ideas: The Potential Impact of Information and Telecommunications Technology," Technology in Society, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 219-230, 1996.

"Artificial Intelligence Within Sociology," Sociological Methods and Research, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 3-30, 1996.

"Modeling Organizational Adaptation as a Simulated Annealing Process" (with David M. Svoboda); Sociological Methods and Research, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 138-168, 1996.

"Adaptive Organizations: A Comparison of Strategies for Achieving Optimal Performance" in Proceedings of the 1996 International Symposium on Command and Control Research and Technology, Monterray, CA, June 1996.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University, Dissertation: "Consensus Construction."

Working Papers

• Numerous measures of organizational structure have been developed. The goal is to develop a small meaningful and predictive set. Work in this area, however, has been hampered by a lack of a standard categorization schema. Such a schema is presented herein. This schema is based on the recognition that many aspects of organizational structures can be represented as graphs.
   

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• Over time organizations change and coordinate personnel in new ways. Such changes may be precipitated by actual or anticipated changes in personnel, the environment, technologies, legislation, or the top management team. This adaptation is constrained and not all forms of coordination are feasible. Since organizations are inherently computational entities insight is gained by examining the adaptation of organizations using intelligent artificial agents. Using ORGAHEAD, a multi-agent model of organizational behavior, a series of virtual experiments were run to examine issues of organizational adaptation. Results suggest the concurrent occurrence of experiential learning and structural learning generates within the organization the ability to learn meta-change strategies which can be either adaptive or maladaptive. Such meta-change strategies effectively lock organizations into divergent paths of behavior which produce heterogeneity of form across the population of organizations. Organizational performance and form depend on a complex of array of factors including environmental change, experiential and structural learning, and the emergence of institutionalized strategies.
   

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• Organizations are complex systems. They are also information processing systems comprised of a large number of agents such as human beings. Combining these perspectives and recognizing the essential non-linear dynamics that are at work leads to the standard non-linear multi-agent system conclusions such as: history matters, organizational behavior and form is path dependent, complex behavior emerges from individual interaction, and change is inevitable. Such a view while descriptive, is still far from the level of specificity and predictive richness that is necessary for organizational theory. To increase the specificity and value of our theories we will need to take into account more of the actual attributes of tasks, resources, knowledge and human cognition. In doing so, it will be possible to achieve a more adequate description of organizations as complex computational systems. More importantly, we will also achieve a greater ability to theorize about the complexity of organizational behavior. This paper describes complexity theory and computational organization theory. Then a description of organizations as complex computational systems is presented and operationalized as a computational model. Within this perspective, organizational behavior results form the actions of heterogeneous actors, the boundaries between agents, tasks, and resources are permeable, organizational roles emerge, organizational groups are networks, and information technology plays a key role as an interactive agents.
   

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• This paper presents a network based approach to characterize organizational architectures in terms of three domain elements - individuals, tasks, and resources. Characterizing the possible relations among these elements results in five relational primitives - Precedence, Commitment of resources, Assignment of individuals to tasks, Networks (of relations among personnel) and Skills linking individuals to resources. It is demonstrated that the utility of this model for re-characterizing classical organizational theory and for generating a series of testable hypotheses about organizational performance.
   

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• A Structural Perspective on Organizational Cognitions: Attributions of Power, Performance, and Attitudes

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