Autonomous agency theory (AAT) is a viable system theory (VST) which models autonomous social complex adaptive systems. It can be used to model the relationship between an agency and its environment(s), and these may include other interactive agencies. The nature of that interaction is determined by both the agency's external and internal attributes and constraints. Internal attributes may include immanent dynamic "self" processes that drive agency change.
History
Stafford Beer coined the term viable systems in the 1950s, and developed it within his management cybernetics theories. He designed his viable system model as a diagnostic tool for organisational pathologies (conditions of social ill-health). This model involves a system concerned with operations and their direct management, and a meta-system that "observes" the system and controls it. Beer's work refers to Maturana's concept of autopoiesis, which explains why living systems actually live. However, Beer did not make general use of the concept in his modelling process.
In the 1980s Eric Schwarz developed an alternative model from the principles of complexity science. This not only embraces the ideas of autopoiesis (self-production), but also autogenesis (self-creation) which responds to a proposition that living systems also need to learn to maintain their viability. Self-production and self-creation are both networks of processes that connect an operational system of agency structure from which behaviour arises, an observing relational meta-system, this itself observed by an "existential" meta-meta-system. As such Schwarz' VST constitutes a different paradigm from that of Beer.
AAT is a development of Schwarz' paradigm through the addition of propositions setting it in a knowledge context.
Development
AAT is a generic modelling approach that has the capacity to anticipate future potentials for behaviour. Such anticipation occurs because behaviour in the agency as a living system is "structure determined", where the structure itself of the agency is responsible for that anticipation. This is like anticipating the behaviour of both a tiger or a giraffe when faced with food options. The tiger has a structure that allows it to have speed, strength and sharp inbuilt weapons to kill moving prey, but the giraffe has a structure that allows it to acquire its food in high places in a way the tiger could not duplicate. Even if a giraffe has the speed to chase prey, it does not have the resources to kill and eat it. Agency generic structure is a substructure defined by three systems that are, in general terms, referred to as: existential (pattern of thematic relevance that is the consequence of experience); noumenal (representing the nature of a phenomenal effect subjectively through conceptual relationships) phenomenal (maintaining patterns of context related structural relevance connected with action, and constituting an origin for experience). These generic systems are ontologically distinct; their natures being determined by the context in which the autonomous agency exists. The substructure also maintains a superstructure that is constructed through context related propositional theory. Superstructural theory may include attributes of collective identity, cognition, emotion, personality; purpose and intention; self-reference, self-awareness, self-reflection, self-regulation and self-organisation. The substructural systems are connected by autopoietic and autogenetic networks of processes as shown in Figure 1 below.
The terminology becomes simplified when the existential system is taken to be culture, and it is recognised that Piaget's concept of operative intelligence is equivalent to autopoiesis, and his figurative intelligence to autogenesis. The noumenal system now becomes a personality system, and autonomous agency theory now becomes cultural agency theory (CAT). This is normally used to model plural situations like organisations or a nation states, when its personality system is taken to have normative characteristics (see also Normative personality), that is, driven by cultural norms as represented in Figure 2 below. This has developed further through mindset agency theory enabling agency behaviour to be anticipated.