Abstract
I start from the view of Operational Research as a formal and scientific model building activity aimed at helping people tackle ‘real-world’ problems. It is thus an activity which addresses itself to the choices and actions of persons other than the OR practitioner. Its success can only be measured by the extent to which it influences the thinking and action of other people. Put most succinctlyOR is client oriented not solution oriented. At its best, OR practice must therefore be the collusion (sic!) of the dispassionate and ‘objective’ activities of sciencecombined with those aspects of social science which reflect the passion of interaction in organizations. By this I mean the parts of social science that relate to interaction and engagement between people rather than that part which is concerned to study large groups of societies. In recent writing I have referred to this collusion as aiming for a multiplier effect between skills of process management and content management (Eden, 1987a), where the multiplier comes from treating the two skills as intimately and continuously intertwined rather than separately applied.
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© 1989 Plenum Press, New York
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Eden, C. (1989). Operational Research as Negotiation. In: Jackson, M.C., Keys, P., Cropper, S.A. (eds) Operational Research and the Social Sciences. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0789-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0789-1_5
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