Can the Professions of Operations Research/Management Science Change and Survive?

The regular reader of Interfaces has been confronted with constant propheses of trouble for the profession. While these constant omens have produced a new specialization in the profession, research on implementation, actual proposals for change have died for general lack of interest.

It is time to explicate the institutional mechanisms of this profession as a major part of the problem. The difficulty of such an analysis for the OR/MS member lies in the fact that the profession appeals to and upholds specifically the rational, the quantifiable, the feasible and suppresses the nonrational, nonquantifiable, nonfeasible which form and maintain the institution of the profession.