Paradigm change in Operations Research: Thirty years of debate

From the 1970s onwards, the OR community in Britain engaged in ongoing debate on the future of the discipline, the product of an emerging ‘crisis of confidence’ engendered in part by the end of the ‘golden age of western economic growth’ and the associated downsizing, or abolition, of practitioner groups in the corporate industrial sector. In addition, reservations were expressed concerning the increasing ‘mathematization’ of academic OR in the context of the established ‘hard’ or ‘classical’ paradigm. In this respect, British operations researchers, aided and abetted by a number of American colleagues (notably Ackoff, Churchman, and Miser), engaged in a fundamental reappraisal of the OR methodological repertoire and its client base. Thus, in Britain, a new phase in the history of OR was inaugurated whereby the ‘positivist/scientist’ approach bequeathed by the wartime pioneers was subject to challenge and qualification. Whilst some elements in the American OR community empathized with the emergent British critique, the response (notwithstanding Ackoff et al.) was, on the whole, relatively muted. This conservative American response provides one part of the rationale for this paper. The key issue here is to compare and contrast the tone and content of the Anglo-American debate on the future of OR after 1970: In simple terms, why did British OR practitioners and academics (especially the latter) respond so vigorously to the post-1970 OR critique in marked contrast to their American counterparts? In explaining the differential response, the paper will emphasize the interplay among an array of political, intellectual, and economic factors.