Documents on Computational Approaches to Strategy

Update: I added another supplement on perhaps one of the most important issues in doing the research. It extends the emerging form of my personal research program quite nicely.

Update: One more short document added on a confusing term in the document list.

Since late August, I have worked assidiously to outline the following:

1. A justification for using computational methods in strategic theory.
2. An explanation of how I will apply this overriding justification to my own research.

I am very pleased to announce that this project is, for now, tentatively complete. Readers that have kept interest long enough can view my outlines of a conceptual system for my research in these three documents:

1. Computational Approaches to Strategy 1.0 (3 November 2015)
2. Supplement: Personal Research Program 1.0 (13 November 2015)
3. Supplement: Theory, Methodology, and Applications 1.0 (14 November 2015)
4. Supplement: Problems, Frames, and Computation 1.0 (16 November 2015)
5. Supplement: A Guide to Functional and Generative Views 1.0 (16 November 2015).
6. Supplement: Research Planning 1.0 (23 November 2015).

These documents show various dimensions of how the work will be done. They represent months of continuous toil and revision, and constitute a relatively stable set of ideas and contentions that will constrain what I do with my work from here on out. They will, of course, change over time (there are numerous spelling, grammar, sentence structure, clarity, and citation issues to clean up, at a minimum!) but they fill a gap that had held me back for most of my time as a PhD student thus far.

I have spent so much time and effort doing this because of the message of a quote in a pioneering paper on computation and human-computer interaction:

Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and 2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them

In order for computation to be useful to be as a researcher, I had to “set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations.” The computer won’t do that for me. I have to do it for myself. This represents my sweat and toil in doing so.