Free For All—Guest Editorial: Growing Pains in the Management Sciences

I take this occasion to discuss something of the current status of the management sciences in general and of The Institute of Management Sciences in particular. TIMS, now in its 17th year, is suffering from some teenage growing pains. It was founded by a small band of young enthusiasts who foresaw, quite accurately as time has proved, the importance of the physical, social and mathematical sciences in all levels of management. About half of the founders were in universities; most of the others had staff or research positions in government or industry. There were very few managers proper in the founding group or in the membership at large during the early years and then Management Science, although receptive to papers on the underlying philosophy and applications, devoted the bulk of its pages to papers on mathematical models. As the second Editor-in-Chief of Management Science, I can testify that this was a response to the quality and quantity of papers received rather than a matter of editorial policy.