Abstract:
This paper examines the historical development of Operations Research (OR)
and represents different OR methods (methodologies) developed during its
lifetime. Then, considering Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm model of scientific
development as a basis for our work, the former and current status of OR are
analyzed and the future trend is discussed.
Machine summary:
Keywords: Operations Research Methodologies, Kuhn’s Paradigm Model, Hard OR, Soft OR, Critical OR, Postmodern OR, Philosophical Foundations of OR Approaches.
In the early 1970s, criticism got a bit more serious, so that Professor Cook (1973), in a conference named "The State Investigating the Development of Operations … of Research in OR", criticized the lack of involvement of OR men in human problems and said that the relationships between OR and the social sciences were nowhere near as good as they should be.
5. Hard OR Methods (Methodologies): Soft Systems Methodology, SSM (Checkland); Interactive Planning, IP (Ackoff); Strategic Assumption Surfacing and Testing, SAST (Mason and Mitroff, 1981); Systems Intervention Strategy, SIS(Mayon-White); Strategic Choice Approach (SCA) (Friend); Social System Design, SSD (Churchman); Cognitive Mapping, SODA, JOURNEY (Eden and Ackerman); Team syntegrity (Beer) (Caceres, 2010: 51).
Definition: A branch of OR inspired from Marxism and critical theory seeking to reveal hidden layers of power in organization and help marginalized groups Investigating the Development of Operations … to participate in organizational decision making.
169 Investigating the Development of Operations … There is no doubt that the modeling method described is the positivism inductive research approach of scientific enquiry, which constitutes the foundation of traditional OR, and is based on observation and generalization.
OR and Kuhn’s Paradigms: Further Analysis As mentioned earlier, Kuhn sought to find out how science developed, and in addition to the logic of scientific discovery, paid due attention to the social processes involved in that.