OR, Social Science and Strategic Choice

Abstract

This set of papers was prepared for a national event of the Operational Research Society held on 24 October 1979 at the Royal Society in London, to mark the adoption of the new name Centre for Organisational and Operational Research – COOR – for the merged unit of the Tavistock Institute formed by the coming together of the staff of IOR with a group of social scientists from the former Human Resources Centre. It records the close collaboration of staff of the two Tavistock units since the formation of IOR in 1963. After the event, the seven papers presented, by existing members of COOR’s staff and by the former Director of IOR, were bound together in a Tavistock working paper COOR/53. Later, in 2005, the identity of COOR was to disappear in a broader restructuring of a more compact Tavistock Institute in which all unit boundaries were dissolved. The papers report progress at that time in several of the new directions that have since come to characterize the wider IOR legacy: the synthesis of OR and organisational science perspectives; the concern with the challenges of multi-organisational decision-making; the application of the Strategic Choice Approach as a framework for communication; and the challenge of reconciling central policy with local variety. The short paper with which John Stringer opened the closing discussion raises some general questions about the implications of these experiences for the further development of the practice of operational research.