{"id":10154,"date":"2012-06-16T05:37:33","date_gmt":"2012-06-16T09:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=10154"},"modified":"2012-06-16T05:37:33","modified_gmt":"2012-06-16T09:37:33","slug":"the-projects-of-operations-research-and-the-ontology-of-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2012\/06\/16\/the-projects-of-operations-research-and-the-ontology-of-management\/","title":{"rendered":"The Projects of Operations Research and the Ontology of Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d like to test drive my new critical tool (“discipline & ontology” vs. “projects”<\/a>) on my new article, “Operations Research vis-\u00e0-vis Management”<\/a>. \u00a0I think it’s a useful alternative analysis, which would never have made any final, published version of the article, but which nicely brings out the intricacy, subtlety, and importance of the issues at play.<\/p>\n

I would argue that the historiography of OR has been dominated by the notion that OR was, essentially, an attempt (in the footsteps of Taylorism) to transform the ontology of military planning and industrial management from one of seasoned leadership into one of “science”. \u00a0This shows up in the historiography of wartime OR, but especially in treatments of OR’s postwar adoption of mathematical formalism as its intellectual core. \u00a0This last turn has been regarded as a clear departure from any sensible conception of management, and it can therefore only be explained as a kind of fetishization of science.<\/p>\n

As I put it in my paper:<\/p>\n

Prior accounts of OR’s turn to mathematical specialization have … assumed that the development of a mathematical canon represented a sort of pathology of professionalization, which detached it from the generalist investigations touted by its wartime practitioners. Andrew Abbott [The System of Professions<\/em>\u00a0(1988)<\/a>] has suggested that ‘mathematical preeminence’ was a ‘professional regression’ resulting from a turn toward self-regarding academic virtuosity in OR. Thomas Hughes [Rescuing Prometheus<\/em>\u00a0(1998)<\/a>] has grouped OR with systems engineering as a technical form of expertise that became subjected to typical criticisms of technocratic management and had to be supplemented by more humanistic and democratically inclusive ‘postmodern’ methods. Such accounts … suppose a\u00a0chronological process<\/em>\u00a0of neglect or attainment of some general nontechnical conception of management, which might have granted OR wider and more legitimate authority.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

In a footnote, I also observe how recently authors have transplanted this ontological rift from chronology into geography. Both Philip Mirowski in his\u00a0Machine Dreams<\/em>\u00a0(2002)<\/a>\u00a0and John Krige\u00a0in his\u00a0American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe<\/em>\u00a0(2006)<\/a>\u00a0have reckoned that the movement to institutionalize and formalize OR was a distinctively “American” phenomenon that threatened a more demure British or European model of it.<\/p>\n

All of these accounts take OR’s adoption of a mathematical canon as a logical technocratic culmination of a process of rendering governance scientific that began during World War II (or perhaps with Frederick Taylor). \u00a0My argument is that this reading of OR as attempting to transform the ontology of management derives from a very particular reading of OR scientists’ own narratives about themselves.<\/p>\n

Wartime advocates of OR certainly described what they were doing as the application of “scientific method” to problems of military decision. \u00a0And some of their statements, such as physicist Patrick Blackett’s claim in a wartime memorandum that scientists could “help to avoid running the war by gusts of emotion,” would seem to reinforce this sort of ontological rift. \u00a0However, as I argued in my 2007\u00a0BJHS\u00a0<\/em>piece,\u00a0“The Heuristics of War: Scientific Method and the Founders of Operations Research,”<\/a>\u00a0wartime advocates of OR did not envision “science” as replacing some\u00a0alternative\u00a0<\/em>“military” way of making decisions. \u00a0Rather, it was merely an augmentation and routinization of existing planning methods with the aim of meeting already-accepted standards of good decision. \u00a0In Blackett’s quote, attention should be directed to the word “help”.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0project<\/em>\u00a0(Project I<\/strong>) of those who sought to establish OR as its own discipline in the postwar period was to transpose this wartime notion of OR into industrial settings. The canonization of a body of formalism was actually antithetical to that project, because it was only applicable to a restricted set of managerial decisions and engineering tasks. \u00a0Therefore, that canonization constitutes a separate<\/em> project (Project II<\/strong>), the ascendancy of which requires explanation.<\/p>\n

For those OR practitioners who adhered to the original project, the canonization of mathematics represented a threat to their aspirations, because the new canon was\u00a0clearly<\/em>\u00a0insufficient to stake a claim to general influence over managerial thought. \u00a0In response, by the 1960s and ’70s,\u00a0some\u00a0<\/em>among this subset of Project I advocates responded by vocally developing a third<\/em> project (Project III<\/strong>) to expand upon (or escape) the boundaries of mathematized OR by emphasizing things like\u00a0“soft systems”<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0“wicked problems”<\/a>, which were meant to supplement OR’s restrictive mathematical canon with a more humanistic methodology.<\/p>\n

I believe it is from this sub-subset of OR advocates that we obtain the historiographical notion that the bounds of OR were coterminous with the ontology of management itself, and thus that mathematization could be understood as simply a fetishistic pathology in the history of OR.<\/p>\n

In the hands of historians adhering to a “discipline & ontology” model, Project III’s narrative becomes an irresistible<\/em> Whig narrative — a movement of the ontology of management from a technocratic misconception to a more mature, culturalized perception. \u00a0In effect, the Project III narrative jibes with our own professional narrative<\/em>, and is therefore accepted unquestioned. \u00a0And, actually, there is even\u00a0some evidence<\/a> of disciplinary entanglement between us and Project III proponents in the ’60s and ’70s!<\/p>\n

But this perspective also transposes the agenda of Project III onto the other projects that co-existed with it. \u00a0My suggestion in my new paper is that proponents of Project I were highly unrealistic in their expectations, not because they misconceived management as something that could be made scientific, but because their project was actually in competition with a host of other\u00a0Existing Projects <\/strong>to improve management (like management consulting and consumer research), which they either felt they could subsume, or to which they simply paid little heed. \u00a0Because they ignored those projects’ importance, so have their historians, who have assumed that whatever failures OR experienced came not from competition, but from resistance by those representing a more traditionalist ontology (either conservatively or wisely).<\/p>\n

My argument here accords with that made by Imperial College PhD student Michael Weatherburn<\/a>, who is studying various managerial modernization “systems” in interwar Britain. \u00a0According to Michael, the British historiography of industry assumes that British industrialists were simply conservative-minded, and thus slow to modernize. \u00a0In fact, his assiduous research<\/a>\u00a0into industrial archives and various\u00a0<\/em>modernization systems shows that most industrial modernization efforts have simply been ignored because they were not publicized, and they did not bear the imprint of whatever “system” critics and historians have assumed constituted the vanguard of modernization.<\/p>\n

By my argument, then, Project I proponents — failing to distinguish themselves amid this rich, but largely uncharted array of existing modernization projects — were not undermined\u00a0<\/em>by mathematical fetishists in their ranks or by traditionalist management; they were\u00a0saved<\/em>\u00a0by a new association with\u00a0Project II proponents, whose techniques were novel and valuable (if restricted in their applicability). \u00a0In business-speak, Project I had the (war-tested) “OR” brand, Project II had a product that could be sold in a crowded market.<\/p>\n

I would like to stress that we should not think of\u00a0any <\/em>of the projects discussed here as in existential tension with some “traditional” ontology of management (a chimerical\u00a0Primordial Project?<\/strong>). \u00a0If Project III did seek to develop a body of intellectual knowledge coterminous with management, Projects I and II relied not on their authority over the intellectual contents of management, but on\u00a0institutional arrangements\u00a0<\/em>that integrated their work legitimately and productively with existing managerial work.<\/p>\n

This becomes clear if you take proponents’ meta-commentary on their work seriously, or look at their pedagogical practices. \u00a0For example, in my new paper, I point to the report on the first course in OR taught at MIT from 1950 (during the early ascendancy of Project II, but before it had supplanted Project I):<\/p>\n

‘Real problems,’ the report stressed, ‘do not fall neatly into one or another of the usual categories of knowledge, but cut widely across boundaries. \u00a0Successful O\/R’ made sure that the ‘wholeness of the problem’ was ‘not artificially suppressed.’ \u00a0The report pointed out that qualitative understanding of a problem was a ‘prerequisite to useful quantitative work. \u00a0A crude solution of the real problem’ could have great benefits, ‘whereas a precise solution of an unjustified idealization of the problem is at best worthless and, if its misleading conclusions are acted on, may do great harm’ (110).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The report later went on to describe how students were specifically disciplined not\u00a0<\/em>to see management in purely formalized terms, noting the<\/p>\n

‘interesting tendency of many of the students, especially those majoring in mathematics … ; they appeared to be disturbed emotionally by the uncertainty and large scope of some of these problems, and too quick to seize on some neat set of assumptions and then quickly reduce the discussion to a problem of pure mathematics.’ \u00a0These students tended to spend only a few lines formulating the problem and then working out pages worth of analytical solution. \u00a0The report went on: ‘It was necessary to combat this tendency vigorously by emphasizing the importance of qualitative considerations and crude approximate analysis by showing that in many cases the essential features of such analysis are understandable in very simple terms and, where not, are not reliable anyway.’ \u00a0In the end, apparently, ‘all but two or three fell into the spirit of the assignments and produced very creditable reports’ (111-112).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Certainly not the words of people susceptible to mathematical fetishism! — but also not anyone likely to stick out in the crowded world of managerial improvement.<\/p>\n

What, then, of the decision and management theorists who explicitly\u00a0attempted to develop formalized theories of managerial decision-making (as at Carnegie Tech<\/a>)? \u00a0I would group them as a\u00a0fourth\u00a0<\/em>project (Project IV<\/strong>!),\u00a0<\/em>which was an\u00a0attempt to develop an\u00a0academic vocabulary<\/em>, which could bring intellectual order to a stew of managerial thought, but which was not readily translatable into actual suggestions for managerial improvement<\/em>. \u00a0In other words, I would stress that the historical record shows no strong evidence that Project IV work gave intellectual authority to Project II proponents attempting to realize the aspirations of Project I. \u00a0That\u00a0<\/em>would\u00a0be a story that would only make sense to proponents of Project III, who wanted to privilege their own approach to management, while characterizing others’ approaches as fetishistic and infeasible.<\/p>\n

Nobody ever said history was simple! \u00a0All these projects were, of course, interrelated, but they are, in fact, distinguishable if you bother to parse them out of the record. \u00a0In many ways, the ways these projects played off each other actually relied\u00a0on the fact that they were not<\/em> easily distinguishable. \u00a0However, the only way the history makes sense without invoking things like scientific fetishism is if you make the distinctions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d like to test drive my new critical tool (“discipline & ontology” vs. “projects”) on my new article, “Operations Research vis-\u00e0-vis Management”. \u00a0I think it’s a useful alternative analysis, which would never have made any final, published version of the article, but which nicely brings out the intricacy, subtlety, and importance of the issues at<\/p>\n

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