The conflict between these perspectives is reflected in research that separates these two factors, focusing on how structure influences organizational behavior devoid of personal attributes, or on attributes excluding the relationships that contextualize individual behavior. Today, a new view isemerging of organizations as inherently complex, computational and adaptive systems. This new perspectiveurges a reconsideration of the roles of relations and attributes as symbiotic mechanisms. From this perspective, organizations are synthetic agents composed of multiple intelligent adaptive agents constrained and enabled by their positions in networks linking agents and knowledge.
Technology plays two roles - agent and agent enhancer.
A number of virtual experiments were conducted within this computational laboratory to examine the effect of fundamental social processes and information technology ongroup behavior. The results suggest that one of the dominant effects of knowledge management technology may be to alter the formation of groups and social capital within the organization with little or no impact onperformance. She has developed and used several computational models fortheorizing about social and organizational adaptation, knowledge management, and information security. She has written over 50 papers and is the co-author of 2 books using computational models and associated empirical evidence to explore the impact on group and organizational processes of individual learning, interaction, and response to changing conditions such as turnover, mobility, new technology, and discovery. She and Mike Prietula founded and run the annual workshop in computational and mathematical organization theory.