Rethinking the Process of Operational Research and Systems Analysis

Abstract

Both practitioners and teachers of OR and Applied Systems Analysis have suffered from the fact that, until the present, the subject has lacked a firm methodological base. A simple explanation for is that the subject has its formal origins in traditional laboratory science, but that its practice lies firmly in the realm of applied social science. Both supporters and opponents of the subject, have, therefore tended to define it to suit their own purposes, and practitioners have, by and large, explained themselves in terms of this is what I do. There has been increasing dissatisfaction with state of affairs and in recent years a number of researchers and practitioners in different countries have set out to provide a more rigorous framework for understanding what the subject is really about; based on successful experience, rather than on hypothetical ideas as to what the subject should be. This book is the consequence of a meeting between a distinguished group of such practitioners and methodologists at a seminar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in August 1980. They found that there was a substantial agreement as to how the subject should be described and went away to write their own personal commentary on common overview. The papers are diverse in style and intention -- some are intensely practical, others are deeply philosophical. Together they provide, perhaps for the first time a coherent, interlocking, set of ideas which can be considered as the foundations on which we may describe the subject as a science in its own right. Practitioners and teachers of OR and Systems Analysis will find the book directly useful as well as intellectualy stimulating, and philosophers of science will find much in it that is relevant to their thinking.

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