Sense-making and communities of tolerance: emerging outcomes in the modeling of a conceptual framework applying multi-agent systems
Authors: Dottie E. Agger-Gupta
Venue:  (2007)

This research contributes to a better understanding of the manner theory and practice is integrated in order to explore and discover relationships between emerging collective patterns and individual styles of sense-making. As members of an organization maintain individual and collective accounts of events, their social interaction and individual sense-making styles are responsible for the collective growth or total depletion of the community. A conceptual framework is proposed to study and establish the relationship between the manners in which an individual's sense-making influences the collective sense-making and the manner in which the collective sense-making influences individual sense-making. This dissertation examines the processes and conditions by which equivocality is reduced, sustained, or increased in an organizational setting both individually and collectively. The research methodology involves the framing and synthesis of the knowledge landscape, literature, and scholarly conversations on sense-making in order to create a new perspective. The design of a conceptual framework is contextualized from the strengths and weaknesses, as well as the challenges and opportunities, found in the construction of a practical model of sense-making. The construction of a multi-agent computer model formalizes the proposed conceptual framework to serve as the non-linear simulation tool for experimentation. Finally, the dissertation presents the design, planning, and execution of non-linear simulations used in this research. In these simulations, certain conditions and properties are controlled and manipulated to generate the data that will be evaluated and analyzed for this research. This study analyzes the results from the simulations and formulates claims that explore which conditions and individual sense-making styles are more appropriate and conducive to maintain, grow, or deplete collectives. This study builds on the literature of organizational sense-making and the design theory of social simulations integrated with relevant notions from complexity theory. The findings from this research formulate new insights on the role of initial conditions and individual sense-making styles, when a particular conceptual framework is adopted, for depleting, sustaining, or growing entire populations of agents as they evolve and develop through their individual and collective sense-making. The analysis of the results offers new perspectives in the use of social simulation tools and the conditions that deplete, sustain, or grow individual and collective sense-making defining them for the purpose of this study as communities of tolerance and communities of intolerance. The findings suggest that when the same initial random conditions are applied to a diverse set of sense-making styles, emerging collective growth is experienced. Common sense will probably suggest otherwise; in those communities constituted with a less diverse set of sense-making styles, collective emerging growth is experienced less often. Furthermore, in a community constituted with only one shared sense-making style, the sensitivity on initial conditions was higher than in those communities constituted by a diverse set of multiple sense-making styles. The study concludes with implications for restarts and practitioners and recommendations for father research.