Members are:
Stephen Cowley, Davide Secchi, Billy Adamsen, Torben Andersen, Erin Beatty, Rie Thomsen, Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen, Michael Mandrup, Jen Noël Fabel, Bjarne Christensen and PhD Student Matthew Harvey
The mission of COMAC is to develop the academic field of organisational cognition by seeking to address the needs of local communities and orgnisations. In the Enabling Cluster, we explore human achievements by connecting Cognitive Science, Organisational Behaviour and the Humanities. Our main concerns are with the roles of Experience, Organising and how Individuals achieve outcomes in the actual world. We study events in highly complex settings, how novelties arise and how these affect what people think, feel and do. We aim to develop new ways of tracking how collaborative actions contribute to both organisations and a wider society. Cognitive science often focuses on hardware, tasks and information processing. By contrast, we scrutinise what people do in the actual world. To pursue human achievements, we look at cognition beyond the brain and body. Accordingly, we focus on how individuals contribute to organising and, just as crucially, how organisations can enable/disable the potential of individuals. Building on the humanities, we ask how outcomes bind the use of sense-saturated activity with thinking, decision-making and local ways of organising. Organizational cognition is thus a necessary complement to human embodiment. We pursue the ideas theoretically, in the laboratory, and by using agent based modelling. Our aim is to demonstrate the value of a cognitive approach to local organisations and communities. We sketch our work under four headings:
IQC
Talent depends on how people do things together. Accordingly, in rethinking this important issue, we focus on IQC –the role of individuals, qualifications and competencies and, above all, how these can work together.
Agent-based modelling (ABM)
ABM is a relatively new tool for exploring the world of organisations. It is a heuristic for thinking think things that we could never do without computers –how it is that past events impact on the present as agents do things together.
The case of peer-review
Peer-review is a central part of science and a paradigm of organisational cognition.
Innovation and Sustainability