Operational Research at the Crossroads: Cecil Gordon and the Development of Post-War OR

Rosenhead, Jonathan

doi:10.2307/2583074

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…In this section, we illustrate this usage by means of brief sketches of the application of OR in three areas of practice: in military research during World War II; in the post World War II mining industry; and in 1960s town planning. Here we draw upon documentary sources, interviews with OR practitioners with historically relevant experiences, and a body of knowledge produced by earlier research into the history of OR (Rosenhead, 1989b(Rosenhead, , 1991.…”

Section: Some Historical Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The uses of observation: combining problem structuring methods and ethnography

Horlick-Jones

Rosenhead

2007

Journal of the Operational Research Society

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In this paper, we examine conceptual and practical aspects of carrying out cross-disciplinary, multi-method, interventions that bring together methods from operational research (OR) with ethnographic tools drawn from sociology and anthropology. We note that such methodological hybridization is not a new development, although historically, the role of ethnography in OR has not always been explicit in written accounts. We illustrate such usage by means of a number of concrete examples. We then describe recent work in which we have successfully combined problem structuring methods with ethnographic investigations in order to address disparate problem issues.

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Section: Some Historical Examplesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The uses of observation: combining problem structuring methods and ethnography

Horlick-Jones

Rosenhead

2007

Journal of the Operational Research Society

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“…For some it was an alternative not only to traditional military decision making but also to the price mechanism. 58 It was in such accounts pure "scientific method" unencumbered by association with things, and especially with weapons, and thus a potent example of what science could bring to statesmanship.…”

Section: P Snow Anti-historianmentioning

confidence: 99%

C. P. Snow as Anti-Historian of British Science: Revisiting the Technocratic Moment, 1959–1964

Edgerton

2005

Hist Sci

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For the American political scientist Samuel Beer, twentieth-century political culture had two strands: the technocratic and the populist. I But in Britain, he argued, the technocratic strand appeared only briefly. The "opening salvo" of this technocratic moment was C. P. Snow's "two cultures" lecture of 1959; also important was the 1963 special issue of Encounter on the "suicide of a nation"," The results were: the [Lionel] Robbins Report on the expansion of higher education in Britain of 1963, reform in the "science policy" machinery (including the creation of the Ministry of Technology) of 1963/4, and most important of all, the 1968 [John] Fulton Report on the Civil Service.' According to Beer, the ambition and impact of the technocratic programme had faded by the 1970s.This description is notable for its clarity, but it is a commonplace of British historiography and political comment. Indeed, the failed technocratic moment of the 1960s is one of the key explanatory foci of Britain's account of itself. It is taken, within the dominant technocratic tradition, as the exception that proves the rule that British political and administrative culture was anti-technocratic. But it was the technocratic moment that itself defined Britain in this way. The technocratic moment was ideologically much more significant than has been recognized, and much less significant in policy terms: it defined a whole mode of thinking about the British elite and state, and British science, technology and industry in particular. It gave us at least thirty years of technocratic and declinist historiography, and indeed analyses like Beer's where British technocracy hardly exists except in this brief moment. It generated cliches like "two cultures" and "the white heat", and criticism of the "establishment", the "traditional culture", the "stagnant society", and the "sick man of Europe" that are still remarkably current. The arguments have been repeated as if nothing had happened in the interim, and as if they were credible in the first place.' It is hardly surprising then that Snow's The two cultures is still in print now with an introduction by a Cambridge intellectual historian.> The special issue of Encounter was issued as a paperback in 1994. 6 The technocratic moment primarily was one where the technocratic critique of British institutions was very prevalent, rather than one where British technocrats werc elebrated. This technocratic critique was a central common feature of declinism, which some historians have associated with other proximate causes.' For declinism, the view that the relative decline of Britain was due to Britishfailings almost always took those failings to be ones which more, and more powerful, technocrats would have avoided.' Central to the technocratic critique is what might be called the anti-history

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“…OR, because of the socialist perspective of many of its originators was exposed to this chill wind. (Rosenhead 1989) The fact remains that serious governmental interest in civil OR in Britain had to await the latter half of the 1960s, following the election of a Labour Government ostensibly committed to economic planning and industrial modernisation.…”

Section: Florence Trefethen Wrotementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Externally, the end of the "golden age" of western economic growth was signalled by the devaluation of the US dollar in 1972 and the ÿrst oil crisis in 1973-1974. It is a facile point, but in an increasingly complicated world consisting of a series of unpredictable "messes," a discipline with its roots embedded ÿrmly in the "classical" methodology forged in the 1940s and 1950s was bound to encounter a crisis of conÿdence (Eilon 1975, Sadler 1978, Radford 1978, Harris 1978, Rosenhead 1978, Dando and Bennett 1981, Collcutt 1981. At the sectoral level, the current historian of British Petroleum has described how the company's commitment to linear programming as a means of planning its global operations was rapidly eroded after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war so that the company entered the 1970s with a managerial style based upon pragmatism, far removed from any notions of global modelling with the aid of computer simulations (Bamberg, forthcoming).…”

Section: The "Crisis" Of Or: From the 1970s To The 1990smentioning

confidence: 99%

Operations Research Trajectories: The Anglo-American Experience from the 1940s to the 1990s

Kirby

2000

Operations Research

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This paper is derived from the author's sponsored history of Operations Research in Britain from its formal inception in the later 1930s. It is inspired by the knowledge that any history of OR in Britain that ignores the interrelationship with OR in the United States would be grossly incomplete. This relates not only to the period of military collaboration in World War II but also to the profound influence on British operations researchers of American-derived techniques and methods. The Anglo-American perspective serves also to highlight major contrasts, as well as striking similarities in the development of OR in both countries. The paper advocates the need for ongoing research into the history of OR as an essential complement to the advancing frontier of knowledge, both in theory and in practice. Virtually all disciplines worthy of university-level study have their chroniclers, and this should apply with no less force to OR in the light of its impressive trajectory of development and early acknowledgment of its utilitarian value in a wide variety of settings in the public and private sectors.

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Operational Research at the Crossroads: Cecil Gordon and the Development of Post-War OR

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

The uses of observation: combining problem structuring methods and ethnography

The uses of observation: combining problem structuring methods and ethnography

C. P. Snow as Anti-Historian of British Science: Revisiting the Technocratic Moment, 1959–1964

Operations Research Trajectories: The Anglo-American Experience from the 1940s to the 1990s

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