Management Research on Reciprocity: A Review of the Literature

Although reciprocity is fundamental to all social orders, management research offers few reviews of the concept’s theoretical origins and current applications. To help bridge this gap, we elucidate the dominant understandings of reciprocity, ask which areas of research emerge from them, and explore how they interconnect. Our bibliometric methodology detects four clusters of management research on reciprocity. Across these clusters, authors subscribe mainly to substantialist ontology, marginalize morally oriented motives consistent with relational ontology, and largely assume that benefit-oriented motives underlie reciprocity. We outline the advantages of a moral-oriented relationalist concept of reciprocity and discuss potential areas for its development in management research.

Simbrain: A visual framework for neural network analysis and education

Simbrain is a visually-oriented framework for building and analyzing neural networks. It emphasizes the analysis of networks which control agents embedded in virtual environments, and visualization of the structures which occur in the high dimensional state spaces of these networks. The program was originally intended to facilitate analysis of representational processes in embodied agents, however it is also well suited to teaching neural networks concepts to a broader audience than is traditional for neural networks courses. Simbrain was used to teach a course at a new university, UC Merced, in its inaugural year. Experiences from the course and sample lessons are provided.