Dear All,
Here my proposal for a core model of business.
I might be wrong, but all economic models I have seen so far try to
describe the mathematically defined accountable exchange of goods and
provisions. This is both inedaquate for our current society, as the
financial crises regurlarly demonstrate, and even more for societies
back in past to Bronze Age, an alternative societies around the world at
any time. It is further not our aim to automate accounting, but to
document social relations and their influence on the actions of people.
Therefore, the question if someone payed at the supermarket precisely
the last cent is not our concern.
I would however be very much interested if someone has seen a business
model that could describe a Babylonian temple economy as well as ours,
Anyway here my first thoughts:
SOxxx Provision
Subclass of E7 Activity
Scope Note: This class comprises activities of one Actor, the
“provider”, providing to another Actor, the “receiver”, some particular
entity of identifiable social value that is generally regarded to imply
a formal obligation for compensation. The provided entity may be a
material service, such as handing out a kilo of potatoes, repairing a
car, a payment or loan of a monetary amount, or the granting of rights
of ownership or use, etc., and should constitute a well-defined unit.
Except for the case of being a gift in the proper sense or an act of
bribery, a Provision may initialize an obligation of the receiver to the
provider, increase an existing obligation or being itself a compensation
already and decrease or terminate an existing obligation of the provider
to the receiver. A Provision may or may not be associated with a precise
monetary counter-value, agreed or demanded beforehand or afterwards. Be
it with or without a defined monetary value, the units of mutual
provisions should such that the involved parties should be able to
decide when provisions have terminated mutual obligations, different
opinions of partners nonwithstanding. In societies maintaining a
currency, in a typical market purchase partners would exchange some
goods against immediate payment. Such cases should be modelled by
specializing this class to the typical, simplified forms of accountable
exchange business in a society. But even in such societies, economic
difficulties of partners regularly lead to agreements overriding the
specified formal monetary equivalents of provisions, which a
historically correct model must be able to represent adequately.
SOxxx Business Obligation
Subclass of SO1 Social Bond
Scope Note: This class comprises a temporary relationship of a socially
accepted form between two business partners consisting of an obligation
to make compensating provisions to each other, normally with the goal to
terminate the obligation immediately or within some agreed time-span. An
instance of SOxxx Business Obligation may implicitly come into being by
an agreed-on initial provision of one partner, or by a formal contract.
It ends with an agreement of the partners about completed compensation
or the arbitration by a responsible social institution. The obligation
may be accountable, i.e., quantifiable in terms of a currency, and
compensation may be agreed to be defined arithmetically based on
monetary values and counter-values, such as when paying for a purchase
in a supermarket, but also when paying back a loan with interest rates
for years. In other cases, partner may agree to define the compensation
of obligations by a set of particular material provisions, or by a
combination of monetary exchange and provisions without a defined
monetary counter-value, as characteristically in small communities,
earlier societies but also in exchanges between cultural heritage
institutions. Even in a modern industrialized society, business
obligations may be supported by but are not defined by mathematical
accounting. Economic difficulties of partners regularly lead to
agreements overriding the defined monetary counter-values. Even if the
units of provisions made are well-defined, partners may not agree on the
termination of the obligation and appeal to an arbiter.
Informal obligations, such as those initiated by gifts or attempts of
bribery, and obligations by other social interactions that cannot be
formally compensated or terminated, in whatever form of community or
society, *do not fall* under this class and may be modelled as other
forms of obligation sharing more general traits with this class.
--
------------------------------------
Dr. Martin Doerr
Honorary Head of the
Center for Cultural Informatics
Information Systems Laboratory
Institute of Computer Science
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
N.Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton,
GR70013 Heraklion,Crete,Greece
Vox:+30(2810)391625
Email: [email protected]
Web-site: http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl
