Multi-Agent Simulation and Management Practices

Intelligent agents offer a new and exciting way of understanding the world of work. Agent-Based Simulation (ABS), one way of using intelligent agents, carries great potential for progressing our understanding of management practices and how they link to retail performance. We have developed simulation models based on research by a multi-disciplinary team of economists, work psychologists and computer scientists. We will discuss our experiences of implementing these concepts working with a well-known retail department store. There is no doubt that management practices are linked to the performance of an organisation (Reynolds et al., 2005; Wall & Wood, 2005). Best practices have been developed, but when it comes down to the actual application of these guidelines considerable ambiguity remains regarding their effectiveness within particular contexts (Siebers et al., forthcoming a). Most Operational Research (OR) methods can only be used as analysis tools once management practices have been implemented. Often they are not very useful for giving answers to speculative ‘what-if’ questions, particularly when one is interested in the development of the system over time rather than just the state of the system at a certain point in time. Simulation can be used to analyse the operation of dynamic and stochastic systems. ABS is particularly useful when complex interactions between system entities exist, such as autonomous decision making or negotiation. In an ABS model the researcher explicitly describes the decision process of simulated actors at the micro level. Structures emerge at the macro level as a result of the actions of the agents and their interactions with other agents and the environment. We will show how ABS experiments can deal with testing and optimising management practices such as training, empowerment or teamwork. Hence, questions such as “will staff setting their own break times improve performance?” can be investigated.

The ethical ambivalence of resistant violence: notes from postcolonial south Asia

In the face of mounting militarism in south Asia, this essay turns to anti-state, ‘liberatory’ movements in the region that employ violence to achieve their political aims. It explores some of the ethical quandaries that arise from the embrace of such violence, particularly for feminists for whom political violence and militarism is today a moot point. Feminist responses towards resistant political violence have, however, been less straightforward than towards the violence of the state, suggesting a more ambivalent ethical position towards the former than the latter. The nature of this ambivalence can be located in a postcolonial feminist ethics that is conceptually committed to the use of political violence in certain, albeit exceptional circumstances on the basis of the ethical ends that this violence (as opposed to other oppressive violence) serves. In opening up this ethical ambivalence – or the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir says – to interrogation and reflection, I underscore the difficulties involved in ethically discriminating between forms of violence, especially when we consider the manner in which such distinctions rely on and reproduce gendered modes of power. This raises particular problems for current feminist appraisals of resistant political violence as an expression of women's empowerment and ‘agency’.