The Emergence of Network Organizations in Processes of Technological Choice: a Viability Approach

Traditionally, the analysis of emerging structures (technologies, conventions, etc.) starts from the specification of micro-behaviors through local rules (such as “agent i chooses a technology x if the majority of agents has chosen this technology”) in order to study the macroscopic evolution of the system. In this context, the network organization is given. The general purpose of this approach is to derive the collective consequences which cannot be extrapolated from any kind of representative individual behavior. See for instance [12, David, Foray & Dalle] and its bibliography. In this paper, we follow the opposite track: instead of deriving some indeterminism from deterministic systems, we rather detect some regularities from indeterministic micro-mechanisms.