Talking Prose All These Years: Agent-Based Modeling as Process-Oriented Analysis

This article considers the implications of an approach to computer simulation called agent-based modeling for process-oriented analysis. It argues that many theoretical and methodological debates found in the latter field can be effectively advanced by the former. The argument is presented and then extended using a ubiquitous agent-based model proposed to improve understanding of ethnic residential segregation. The argument has three strands. The first is that theoretical and methodological debates are unlikely to progress unless they can be "cashed out" empirically. The second is that agent-based modeling (and its distinctive methodology) has capabilities to do this that existing research methods lack and, in fact, that agent-based models are a natural way to represent "social process" as apparently conceived by process-oriented analysis. The third is that possibilities exist for productive synthesis between agent-based modeling and process-oriented analysis with the former clarifying, instantiating, and perhaps even testing notions of process developed by the latter.