The easy chair: Is it possible to have a good definitional description of operations research and management science?

From the earliest days of operations research, when its workers were asked what their field of interest was, they often responded with single-sentence ‘definitions’, even while recognizing that such formulations were inadequate descriptions. When the term management science emerged shortly after World War II, the matter was complicated by the implied need to make a distinction where the basics made it almost impossible to do so. Over the years a number of single-sentence definitions of both fields have found their way into print and have been copied in articles and books. In the preface to their Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science, Gass and Harris offer versions of some such statements and even add a short one of their own: ‘the science of operational processes, decision making, and management.’ In the Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science series, in the volume Operations Research and the Public Sector, Pollock and Maltz offer a similar set for operations research and then observe, ‘None of these definitions, unfortunately, are sufficiently specific to distinguish it [operations research] from related fields …; in this Handbook we make no distinction between [operations research and management science]…. Thus, a consensus definition of ‘Operations Research’ is, by all the evidence in the introspective articles that have appeared in Operations Research and Management Science since the mid 1950s, still sorely lacking.’