Factors in the emergence and sustainability of self-regulation

We are interested in organizations whose goals do not primarily involve profit, if it even figures at all, but which instead seek to create social capital in a wide variety of forms. Such organizations have widely varying lifetimes, but without an equivalent to accountancy to analyse their state of health and their evolution, it can be hard to establish what brings them about, sustains them or leads to their dissolution. We report on some preliminary work on the analysis of three such organizations, using three different approaches. Our aim is to see what common factors can be observed, in order to establish the basis for a normative model of organizations, that may then form the core of an agent-based simulation, through which we might explore the sensitivity to and dependencies between the factors.