Heterarchical Structure Research Articles

Metaphysical foundationalism, heterarchical structure, and Huayan interdependence

Metaphysical foundationalism, heterarchical structure, and Huayan interdependence

Reversals of fortune: Shared governance, “democracy,” and reiterated problem-solving

What can the deep past tell us about how “good government” is instituted, replicated, and maintained through time? After a comparative look at late prehistoric political formation in Europe, a case study from Sweden is examined. During the Iron Age, systems of participatory governance developed across Europe, perhaps in response to the autocracies of the previous Bronze Age. Heterarchical structures with systems of checks and balances provided voice for ordinary people, as well as leaders, but there were clear “reversals of fortune,” as autocracy and more egalitarian structures were interspersed through time. The so-called “Long Iron Age” is consequently seen as an extended period of tension between different forms of government, different political ideologies, and the dynamic negotiation of socio-political norms, with repercussions that extend into recent times.

A comparative approach to quantify the heterarchical structures of complex systems

The dynamics and adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems are heavily contingent on system structure, which is established through geography, institutions, interactions, and movement. Contrasting views of system structure, as hierarchies and single-level networks respectively, have tended to emphasize the role of either top-down or lateral (peer-to-peer) connections. The concept of a heterarchy aims to capture both top-down and lateral connections on orthogonal axes and has been proposed as a way of unifying alternative approaches to measuring structure, but it has not been fully operationalized for quantifying and comparing system structures. We developed a simple approach to consistently quantifying heterarchical structure across different kinds of networks. We first calculated suitable metrics, including modularity and a hierarchy score, for a wide range of both simulated and real-world systems including food webs, biological, infrastructure, and social networks. Metrics were corrected for differences in size and magnitude. The results were then visualized as a heterarchy matrix. We compared the angle (degrees) and Euclidian distance of each simulated and real-world network from the center of the matrix between network groups. All networks showed distinct placement on the heterarchy matrix. Relative to one another, food webs were laterally polycentric, social networks were mainly pyramidal and coordinated polycentric, and biological networks were pyramidal and laterally polycentric. Our test of concept, although relatively basic, provides strong evidence that system structure cannot be fully understood as purely laterally connected or purely hierarchical. System resilience requires a trade-off between modularity, aiding redundancy and collaboration; and hierarchy, aiding efficient action. Our approach has the potential to provide a robust, accessible methodology to quantify system structure that allows for universal contextualization, a key step within fields such as resilience and sustainability science.

Transformation of The Role and Functions of HR in The Conditions of New Economic Challenges

The article discusses the new roles and functions of HR specialists in the context of the formation of a new economic model. The first part of the article discusses the reasons for the change in the role and status of HR in the company and the emergence of new areas of work with personnel. Among the main reasons for HR transformation, the author highlights: the formation of a new model of the business environment – the transition from the VUCA-world to the BANI world; digitalization and active development of the gig economy, which caused the emergence of new forms of social and labor relations; changing the model of the organization itself – the spread of heterarchical structures and cross-functional teams, changing the paradigm of employee management – orientation towards the concept of human capital management. The second part of the article provides an overview of the new HR functions. HR transformation is associated with the expansion of the field of attention and sphere of influence of HR specialists. Currently, the focus of HR work is shifting to strategic issues, deep immersion in business, due to the liberation from routine. At the same time, the content of traditional HR functions is changing: new HR functions are becoming more focused and technologically advanced, new employee management tools and new positions are emerging (for example, HR-marketer, HR-Ambassador, HR-evangelist, happiness manager, HR-business-travel, specialist in managing remote work of employees, etc.). Currently, there is a «war for talents» all over the world, associated with attracting the most promising, highly qualified and unique employees. In these conditions, it is the personnel management system that becomes a competitive advantage.

Education Between GovTech and Civic Tech

In the recent movement towards smart societies, smart governments supported by GovTech and smart cities developed through Civic Tech have become known as dominant structures enabled by information and communications technology. Since GovTech and Civic Tech share the goal of giving citizens better and safer lives through their engagement with government and technology, the development of online public services is characterized by the use of collaborative production methods involving various stakeholders and players. Open data, collaboration, and systematic teamwork are key to understanding this production of heterarchical structures. This study reviews previous cases of collaboration between GovTech and Civic Tech, identifies the dominant mechanisms of the smart society, and summarizes existing pedagogical and industrial theoretical systems, mindsets, and skillsets with the aim of developing content for a university course. Double loop learning, design thinking, the Agile methodology, and the lean principle are identified as theoretical systems. Our findings are arranged so that they can be applied in the content of a university-level educational technology course, which we designed to develop students’ transformative competencies to enable them to become active citizens. In addition, we compared the processes involved in observed theoretical systems and conventional pedagogical theories to clarify the differences in their mechanisms. We conclude with a discussion of the need to recognize frameworks of different paradigms to prepare students for transformative social activities.

Security Governance in East Asia and China’s Response to COVID-19

A non-state centric approach challenged the concept of security governance in response to a changed security environment, bringing fragmentation of authority and heterarchical structures into the framework. The existing studies on this approach are largely contextualized from the European experience and developments in its security architecture. This leads to the questions as to whether and how non-state centric security governance occurs in other regions. This article contributes to the literature by studying security governance in East Asia, where the state is a dominant feature in security governance, and through the lens of non-traditional security, with China’s COVID-19 response as a case study. In this particular case, we find that security governance that opens spaces for greater involvement of actors beyond the state could happen, albeit in a more circumscribed manner and subject of certain conditions. We identify three conditions that catalyze the opening of governance spaces: when the capacity of the state is stretched to the limits, when the legitimacy of the government is under pressure, and when there is trust between the government and other actors.

Bioarchaeological Approaches to Understanding Conflict and Collaboration: The Circulation of Violence as a Heterarchical Structure

Bioarchaeological Approaches to Understanding Conflict and Collaboration: The Circulation of Violence as a Heterarchical Structure

Compliance with social requirements for integrated local land use planning in Serbia

ABSTRACT Integrated local land use planning (ILLUP) is promoted as one of the planning instruments in giving territorial expression to societies’ goals, such as sustainable development. Similar efforts were invested in Serbia twice – during the post-WWII socialist period and during the transition towards democratic capitalism after 2000. However, our research on local land use planning as an integrated approach revealed significant inconsistencies in the practice in Serbia with the intended ILLUP. This directed the literature search and review and helped conceptualize not only process-, but also system-related social ILLUP requirements needed for employing the instrument. Apart from offering the heterarchical structure of ILLUP requirements, the paper explains its evolution and advocates calibrating the contextualization with standardization during ILLUP research.

Heterarchical social organizations and relational models: Understanding gender biases in psychological science

In the present study, we sought to explain changes in the proportion of men and women working within North American psychological science in terms of a heterarchical social organization defined by norms and conventions of society, the structure of higher-education institutions, as well as scientific communities. Using archival records from psychology within the U.S., we found that the demographic shift from male-dominated to female-dominated reflects an asymptotic relationship that has been established in the last two decades. An examination of three potential indicators of status (PhD department appointments, general science awards, and scientific awards in psychology) did not indicate a similar trend compared to the ascension of women within psychological science. We believe that this reflects a heterarchical structure: disparate criteria were used to assign women’s status in the social networks of academic institutions and scientific research. Moreover, we also claim that the increase in the number of women and “female-associated” topics has resulted in a general change in the status of psychology.

Policies and Mechanisms to Promote the Production of Knowledge and its Effects on University Scholars: Comparative Analysis among Public Universities in the Northeastern Region of Mexico

The production of knowledge goes through a dominant moment that according to the typology of Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott and Trow (1997) and other authors is inserted in the production 2 called Emergent mode where a transdisciplinary, heterogeneous and heterarchical structure is predominant. The production of knowledge is carried out in context of application, configured by a diverse set of intellectual and social demands. The importance of knowledge and the impact that science-oriented policies have had on the forms of knowledge production by the scholars of the tertiary education is now recognized. These policies have somehow influenced the academy by moving from a personal activity to a community-based profession, fostering a trend towards collective work, with objectives linked to specific social and economic demands whose cost can only be absorbed by the State or those competitors of the industrial world; it moves between small science (made by individuals or small groups) to a great science characterized by groups of researchers participating in programs and wider networks, fully institutionalized, highly professionalized and clearly specialized. Thus, this communication aims to show the existing relationship between the policies that the Mexican State has been promoting to public universities about the production of knowledge that university scholars develop as part of their substantive functions. It is evident how these policies are being interpreted and operationalized through mechanisms that favor (or not) the production of knowledge and how the results of this production impact both inside the university study houses as well as the social and productive sectors. In particular, a comparative analysis is carried out among five public university institutions that make up the northeast of Mexico.

Global, Relational, and Sexual Motivation: A Test of Hierarchical Versus Heterarchical Effects on Well-Being

The quality of sexual motives is an important predictor of sexual well-being. However, how sexual motives are integrated to psychological functioning beyond the sexual domain remains poorly understood. In this study, we used self-determination theory, the hierarchical model of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and principles of heterarchical conceptual modeling to investigate motivational antecedents and well-being consequences of autonomous and controlled sexual motivation at three levels of psychological functioning: sexual, relational, and global. University students (N = 853; women = 684, men = 169 men; Mage = 19.93, SD = 4.14) completed validated measurement of motivation and well-being at these three levels of psychological functioning. Results revealed that motives for performing everyday behaviors in general (i.e., global motivation) and motives for being in a committed relationship (i.e., relational motivation) predicted the quality of sexual motives. In turn, the quality of sexual motives predicted differences in well-being. Specifically, high autonomous and low controlled sexual motivation were associated with an overall pattern of optimal psychological functioning. Sexual motives predicted global and relational well-being beyond the contribution of global and relational motivation. These results reflect a heterarchical structure, in which sexual motives can operate independently from relational processes, as opposed to a hierarchical structure, in which sexual motives fully depend on relational processes to operate. Thus, the quality of sexual motives is associated with broad personality dispositions, relationship processes, and well-being beyond the sexual domain in complex ways. These results help illuminate for whom and when sexual experiences result in benefits or costs to well-being.

Governing arts through valuation: The role of the state as network actor in the European Capital of Culture 2010

Abstract In modern societies, the state plays a crucial role in the management of the arts through funding and more or less direct political intervention. Among these processes practices of valuation supported by specific accounting techniques play an important role. We propose that in order to understand the decision-making processes of the state, their effects on the arts and their management, and how the state and the arts become intertwined in arts management, can be studied through focusing on practices of valuation. This also enables researchers to understand the role of accounting in this intertwinement better. Drawing on David Stark’s concept of heterarchies, we explore the complex practices of valuation in a qualitative case study of the European Capital of Culture (ECC) 2010, ‘Essen for the Ruhr Area’. We show how the state was constructed through multiple actors who acted on behalf of ‘the state’ by using diverging principles of valuation in their interaction with the ECC project organization and its around 300 projects. Our paper contributes to the literature on arts management by casting light on the heterarchical structure of the state, the multiple practices of valuation entailed in its construction and their intertwinement with the arts in arts management. We illustrate the potential of Stark’s work on heterarchies for studying the state and the eminent role of valuation practices for studying accounting.

Talent development as an ecology of games: a case study of Norwegian handball

ABSTRACTStructured talent identification and development, it has been argued, is one of the foundations of international sporting success and many modern elite sport systems have applied normative talent development (TD) models. The success of Norwegian handball, however, is based on an alternative approach to TD. Norwegian handball is characterized by a heterarchical organizational structure in which several key actors function highly autonomously. The aim of this article is three-fold: (a) to describe the organization of TD in Norwegian handball, (b) to identify how the inherent organizational characteristics of Norwegian handball have influenced the TD processes used and (c) to discuss if contemporary TD models provide an adequate conceptualization of the model used in Norwegian handball. This case study includes three units of analysis: (i) the overall organizational structure of Norwegian handball, (ii) the characteristics of the key actors involved and (iii) the inter-communication and collaborations of the key actors. The data sources were (a) documents and (b) interviews with 11 key informants. The informants were selected strategically to represent experienced coaches and professionals from multiple organizational units. The National Handball Federation uses a broad-based model for TD: 23% of male handball players and 15% of female handball players from the age of 13–17 years participate in regional-level initiatives in addition to practising daily in community-based volunteer sport clubs and sport schools. Findings reveal that the broad base of TD initiatives creates multiple access points to the talent pipeline for adolescents. However, because the heterarchical structure involves many actors, the unintended consequences are often related to (im)properly managing training and competition loads. There is a need therefore for well-developed coordination mechanisms and good communication between the key actors involved.

In Defense of Hierarchy: The Hypermodern Structure in U.S. Military and Multinational Corporations

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have had difficulty implementing the heterarchical organizational form defined by Hedlund (1986, 1993). Unlike hierarchical organizations, heterarchical organizations possess the following attributes: (1) a multidimensional structure with respect to knowledge, action, and position of authority, (2) asymmetric ordering of the dimensions, (3) temporary subordination and simultaneous sub- and superordination, (4) nontransitivity and circularity, (5) horizontality, and (6) normative, goal-oriented direction. Although unadulterated heterarchy is not an achievable state, examples from the U.S. military demonstrate how heterarchical principles may be applied in practice. This paper contributes to the extant literature by demonstrating that the heterarchical principles employed by the U.S. military are applicable within MNCs. We posit that a heterarchical structure permits the intentional creation of organized chaos, which in turn allows an MNC to deal with a complex environment ...

The Riddle of Heterarchy: Power Transitions in Cross-Functional Teams

In this paper, we develop the concept of a power heterarchy, which is a conceptualization of power structures in groups that is more dynamic and fluid than traditional hierarchical structures. Through a study of 516 directional dyads in 45 teams, we demonstrate that heterarchical structures in which the expression of power actively shifts among team members to align team member capabilities with dynamic situational demands can enhance team creativity. Our results indicate that this positive effect of power heterarchies on team creativity is contingent on the team perceiving the shifts in interpersonal power expressions as legitimate. We discuss the implications of this heterarchical power structure for research on group functioning, power, and legitimacy in organizations.

Overcoming Dichotomies

A symposium with the title “Tradition, Modernity and Postmodernity: Eastern and Western Perspectives” is in need of a subtitle auch as “Overcoming Dichotomies.” Societies, as well as historical epochs, are complex and overlapping phenomena. A clash between complex civilizations will naturally be a complex encounter. The conflicting parties will always find kindred souls on the other side, motivated by converging interests and values. Modernity and secularism are not inseparable, and tradionality and secularism are not incompatible (see Confucian politology). Two main philosophical reasons for the complexity of civilizations are the heterarchical structure of the human value system and the creative potential of human individuals. These highest values cannot be optimally realized at the same time. The potential for self-fulfillment that every human being has, thanks to his mental structures, excedes the potential for self-fulfillment a singular culture can provide.

International Arbitrators as System-Builders

ARBITRATORS AS THE CENTER OF A HETERARCHICAL SYSTEM International arbitration is a particularly good example of confronting complexity in modern international law and dispute settlement. One-off arbitral tribunals, constituted under different arbitral rules and without a uniform supervisory mechanism, resolve individual cases based on different national and international standards and thus create a tremendous risk of inconsistent decisions. This leaves many observers with the perception that international arbitration resembles a chaos of unconnected episodes of dispute settlement rather than a structured system. This perception reflects the absence of hierarchical ordering structures usually associated with systems of dispute settlement in the domestic context where a supreme court ensures convergence and unity. International arbitration, by contrast, operates in predominantly heterarchical structures. In them, the system's unity cannot be forged through hierarchy but requires auto-convergence of independent actors. For once, elements of convergence exist in the wide adherence of states to important international conventions and due to the harmonizing effect of model laws. Yet every arbitral tribunal remains king in its own empire. Still, one can observe considerable convergence, and hence order, in the practice of arbitral decisionmaking. Convergence is reflected less in legal sources but crystallizes in the sociological structures and linguistic practices of international arbitration. Just as one requires highly elaborate methods of fractal geometry to uncover ordering structures in Jackson Pollock's seemingly chaotic drip paintings, (1) one can uncover order in international arbitration by analyzing the discourse in and about international arbitration rather than concentrating on formal sources. To understand arbitration as a system thus means understanding the importance and power of arbitrators. They are the center that can forge international arbitration into a system or dissolve it in infinite fragmentation. Similar to courts in the domestic context, arbitrators as a group are the key institution for the emergence, persistence, transformation, and hence existence, of international arbitration as a system. (2) After all, uniform substantive and procedural rules only translate into a system if arbitrators apply them accordingly; likewise, arbitrators can even forge divergent legal rules into a convergent and structured whole. Arbitrators therefore determine the gestalt of international arbitration. INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION AS GLOBAL GOVERNANCE The idea that arbitrators determine whether international arbitration constitutes a proper system is closely linked to understanding the function of arbitration not only as a mechanism to settle individual disputes, but as an instrument of global governance. (3) After all, the concept of a system implies that there is an overarching structure connecting individual instances of dispute settlement. This overarching structure develops chiefly on the basis of arbitral precedent. (4) Building on the increasingly widespread publication of arbitral awards, in investment treaty but also in commercial arbitrations, both the decisionmaking of international arbitrators and the argumentation of parties appearing before them are highly precedent-driven. Although it is non-binding, arbitral precedent becomes the primary sources for guiding the resolution of international disputes. It is the use of, and reference to, arbitral precedent that lets arbitrators transform international arbitration into an independent system. Not all arbitrators, however, accept that they operate in a system of governance. They stress that arbitration is a party-controlled and party-owned process in which arbitrators function as agents of the parties. (5) Such a position, however, is not particularly convincing, considering how crucial arbitral precedent has become in forging normative expectations of actual and future parties about how international disputes should be resolved and how parties to international transactions should conduct themselves in the shadow of rulings of arbitral tribunals on matters of substantive and procedural law. …

Genealogies of Nurture: Of Pots and Professors

Genealogies of Nurture: Of Pots and Professors Penny Van Esterik (bio) Kris Lehman loves puzzles, be they linguistic, historical, mathematical, religious, or ecological. He instilled this love of puzzles in his students. In honor of his retirement, this paper builds on his enduring interest in cultural historical puzzles in Southeast Asia. One day in 1970, while planning a thesis on the relationship between Brahmanic and Buddhist ritual in Thailand, I saw a pot with a red-on-buff painted design in an antique store in Bangkok. It probably came from one of the many looted collections of late-period Ban Chiang painted pottery; the complexity of the designs fascinated me. When my daughter Chandra was born three months before my doctoral exams, I took the opportunity to shift my focus of study somewhat. Inspired by Kris Lehman’s work with mathematical modeling and cognitive anthropology, I worked with symmetry theory to produce my PhD thesis on late-period Ban Chiang painted pottery under his direction. In the early 1970s, little was known about the context of the pottery because most was lodged in the illegal private collections of powerful Thai elites; I was limited in what I could do with the information from the collections. Today we know more. To anticipate my argument, we now know that Ban Chiang and many sites in the region elaborated infant burials; fetuses, newborns, and infants were often buried inside ceramic jars or with jars as grave goods. Ban Chiang is a mixed-use mortuary and occupation site in northeast Thailand in mainland Southeast Asia occupied for over two thousand years from about 2100 BCE to 200 CE [End Page 21] Bronze was in use at least by 1500 BCE and iron, by 500 BCE. Here, settled villagers cultivated yams and rice and raised domestic cattle, pigs, and dogs. The mound site was partially excavated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the detailed site report is nearing completion. Speculations: Men of Prowess The site with its beautiful pottery, and the potential for early and indigenous bronze and iron development in the region, encouraged much speculation among Thai and foreign analysts. Were these Thailand’s first rice farmers? Do we have evidence for bronze complexes that were not used for weapons but for personal adornment? Since intensive wet rice agriculture favors rapid population increase, did this result in expansion into formerly unoccupied lands of the Khorat plateau, northeast Thailand? Could these sedentary rice-farming communities be considered chiefdoms led by ‘men of prowess’ or ‘big men’ in the centuries before Indianization? Extensive trade networks provided luxury goods such as marine shell, exotic stone, and leather in the communities of the Khorat plateau. Speculations about the distribution of bronze objects from sites such as Non Nok Tha and Ban Chiang raised questions about social ranking systems, and whether there was direct evidence of organized warfare or only sporadic raiding in the first millennium BCE. Some speculated that there were high levels of conflict in the area, but since almost half the traumatic injuries were on women (Pietrusewsky and Douglas 2002, 171) and are not compatible with war wounds, this is unlikely. Are the sites in the region evidence of a transition from a model where exchange of valuables and the establishment of affinal ties promote alliances with minimal social ranking, to a model where rank was fixed through unequal production and exchange, facilitated by a shift from managed swamps to increasing reliance on fixed rice fields (White 1995)? Wet rice cultivation with a diversified subsistence base can support [End Page 22] large populations necessary for the development of state systems. Arguments abound over the earliest dates for rice, bronze, and iron, and the major transitions in the region — from the Neolithic to Bronze Age to Iron Age and finally to the Indianized states of Southeast Asia. It is also possible that the models we use to make sense of Southeast Asia’s past are biased toward the idea of structure as hierarchical rather than heterarchical structures where each element is either unranked relative to other elements or possesses the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways (Crumley 1987, 158; White 1995...

Autonomy and decentralized decision making in logistics: new ideas, technological innovations, enhanced decision support, and initial applications

The last decade has revealed a profound paradigm change with respect to the organization and control of logistic systems. Forced by recent trends in the organization of enterprises and new market requirements, logistic systems are confronted with new prospects and challenges that do not fit with the paradigm of central planning. The involvement of several decision making units in one supply chain, the management of real-time data, the division of work and decision making, and a high market dynamic require innovative decision support and business information concepts. Additionally, wide-area-computer networks, ubiquitous computing, and 24-h-data availability provide a data basis as well as an infrastructure for a joint decision making among autonomous entities (e.g. agents). While the paradigm of a monolithic central control of all activities has been in the focus of research and application for several decades, the last years have revealed the intrusion of noncentralized approaches for designing, configuring, and deploying complex systems. More than in other disciplines, there is a paradigm shift in logistics from hierarchical systems to heterachical systems, especially concerning the design and control of compound systems. In order to explore and establish a base for using and exploring the capabilities of distributed decision making, fundamental research must be executed. In the Collaborative Research Centre 637 ‘‘Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes—A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations’’, funded by the German Research Foundation, an interdisciplinary group of scientists investigates the prospects and limitation of the interactive decision making among several components of a logistic system. The components of a hierarchically organized logistic system are externally controlled units, which have only limited decision rights. On the other hand, in heterarchical systems, the components constituting a compound system are autonomous units, which interact with each other on their own responsibility, and they are provided with local intelligence and emancipated decision authority. Heterarchical structures grant autonomy to the single system components in order to enable decentralized decision making. Autonomy of components presupposes that interactive units in non-deterministic systems are able to decide and act on their own authority. Autonomous units representing components of a complex logistic system can be found on different levels of appearance and in several contexts. At the lowest level, there are agents representing autonomous physical logistic units like parcels or containers, which are capable and allowed to decide on their handling. At the medium level, there are autonomous planning agents like human schedulers or software agents being responsible for the decisions in a delimited problem area and cooperating with agents responsible for adjacent areas. Finally, at the upper level, there are autonomous organizational units, e.g., profit centers of an enterprise or partners in a collaborative system constituting a coalition following at least one common goal. In practice, most complex logistics systems are built in a hierarchical manner. Currently, there is a tendency to redesign such systems in a heterarchical way by constituting a set of interrelated, partly autonomous, components for the construction of the total system. The objective of the redesign is to achieve a higher degree of robustness and a positive emergence of the total system [1] by increasing H. Kopfer (&) J. Schonberger Lehrstuhl fur Logistik, FB 7, Universitat Bremen, Wilhelm-Herbst-Strase 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany e-mail: kopfer@uni-bremen.de

A multi-agent system for the integration of process planning and scheduling using operation-based time-extended negotiation protocols

This paper proposes the on-line adaptation of a process plan with alternatives, through the application of an operation-based time-extended negotiation protocol for decision-making for the real-time routing of job orders of parts composed of machining operations in a job-shop environment. The protocol is modified from the contract net protocol, which specifies the interaction between agents in a multi-agent system, in order to cater for the multiple tasks and many-to-many negotiations. A multi-agent system model was developed in order to make decisions based on a heterarchical structure, which allows grouping manufacturing parts composed of machining operations through the use of the new protocol. The grouping of the machining operations enables reduction of set-up times, resulting from the reduction of machines changes in flexible manufacturing environments. For each part, all feasible routings are considered as alternative process plans, provided the different manufacturing times in each machine are taken into account. This study evaluates four types of flexibility – operation flexibility, sequencing flexibility, processing flexibility, and machine flexibility – to identify which can provide better performance. The time-extended negotiation period allows the visualisation of all of the times involved in the manufacture of each part, including those times that are not considered in systems of this nature, such as the negotiation times among agents. Extensive experiments have been conducted in the system, and the performance measures, including makespan and flow time, are compared with those obtained by the search technique based on the co-evolutionary algorithm.