The death of the expert

The texts of Operational Research OR are littered, explicitly and implicitly, with myths about the ‘expert’ that are taken for self-evident truths. The authors would like to challenge these. This paper presents arguments following a postmodern route which views the world as text, where all phenomena and events can be regarded as text and, as such, subject to narrative analysis. Narrative analysis explodes and disperses text to reveal forms and codes according to which meanings are possible. The paper will introduce a case study drawing on the authors’ experiences in community OR, which they aim to use to demonstrate this approach.