Proposes a society-level (SoL) view of multi-agent systems. The purposes of a SoL approach are to give: (1) a basis for a principled design methodology of industry-scale multi-agent systems based on and extending the CommonKADS methodology; (2) a structure-preserving mapping of the SoL on to emergent technologies for distributed components and network-centric computations (this mapping provides a semantic grounding of concepts at the SoL); and (3) a framework for the assessment of techniques and methodologies as well as of the foundations of multi-agent systems.