The Legitimacy of Management Science

One of the problems of management science is keeping the needs of management in balance with the requirements of science. Management needs to solve problems and, more fundamentally, to make decisions. Science requires not only rigorous methods, but also, more important in this context, the finding of some measure of “truth.” The purpose of management science is to improve decision making in the direction of organizational goals. The most general activity of management science is the building of models to achieve this purpose. The argument of this note is that: (1) improved decision making implies changed decision making, but not all changes in decision processes are improvements; (2) the definition of improvement is a matter of science; and (3) goal congruence between organizational and model objectives is a necessary condition for improvement.