According to H. Simon basically all viable systems, be they physical, social, biological, artificial, share the property of having a
near decomposable architecture: they are organized into hierarchical layers of parts, parts of parts, parts of parts of parts and so on, in such a way that interactions among elements belonging to the same parts are much more than interactions among elements belonging to different parts. By “intense” interaction is meant that the behavior of one component depends more closely on the behavior of other components belonging to the same part than on components belonging to other parts (i.e. the cross-derivatives are larger within a part). This kind of architecture can be found in business firms, where division of labor, divisionalization, hierarchical decomposition of tasks are all elements which define a
near decomposable system: individuals within a hierarchical subunit have closer, more widespread, more intense and more frequent interactions than individuals belonging to different subunits. But a very similar architecture can also be found in most complex artifacts (which are made by assembling parts and components, which in turn can be assemblies of other parts and components, and so on), in software (with the use of subroutines, and even more so in object-oriented programming) (Egidi and Marengo, 2006).
Learn more in:
Dynamic Specifications for Norm-Governed Systems