An Operational Researcher Looks at the Social Sciences

Abstract

For eighteen years I have been a participant observer of the social science scene as projected onto the University dimension in Britain. For seven of these I was a covert observer, wearing the disguise of an economist and therefore a genuine social scientist. After that I “came out” in my true colours as a management scientist, otherwise an operational researcher, but have still been permitted to retain the status of a social scientist as a member of a Faculty of Social Science. Before being claimed by Academia, however, I used to work in industry and for local and central government, as an operational researcher, then a planner (another kind of social scientist), then an economist. Almost from the start of my first OR project (on systematic activity sampling), I was having to consider ideas, theories and data relating to the social sciences, but I don’t think I was aware of this before Cambridge 1964, the occasion on which we are now looking back. Not that I attended this conference, but my boss at Richard Thomas & Baldwins. Steve Cook, and three of his lieutenants, Mike Simpson, John Banbury and John Lawrence, were heavily involved in its planning, and I slowly realized that anything which was taking up so much time and intellectual energy had to be important. It’s not hard to see why. Almost all of the systems with which operational researchers are concerned are social systems, involving some or many human decision-makers and actors. If OR claims, as it does, to represent the application of science, then the science to be applied is likely to include social science.