The organisational paradigm present in a system determines the structure in which interactions, information propagation and delegation of control occur in the system. It is the key to scalable and flexible solutions in systems with a large number of agents and the need for cooperation to fulfill the agents' individual goals and the system goals.

Organisational paradigms are sometimes also called "social patterns". In S-Tropos (Wautelet et al., 2005), the selection of a social pattern is an activity within the "Detailed Design phase":
"Social patterns are patterns describing MAS as composed of autonomous agents that interact and coordinate to achieve their goal, like actors in human social organizations. Depending on the project a social pattern can be selected in a catalogue in order to describe a problem commonly found in software designs and prescribe a flexible solution for the problem. It allows the reuse of design experience and knowledge. The aim of this activity is, if needed to select a design pattern that can be helpful."

One such catalogue for social patterns is Horling & Lesser, 2004 which describes many different organisational paradigms used in MAS, details their advantages and disadvantages and gives pointers to self-organisation algorithms that create the structures.