Mathematical Management – Operations Research in the United States and Western Europe, 1945 – 1990

Abstract

The rise of Operations Research, which provides mathematical models for the management of commercial enterprises, in the political knowledge culture of Cold War Science is shown and then transferred to the institutionalization of Operations Research in Europe and in the Federal Republic of Germany. The predecessor organizations of the German Society for Operations Research are presented and the interaction of the annual conference of this society with the conferences on a European and worldwide level. It tells how numerous chairs for corporate research and operations research were founded at universities between 1960 and 1980. The connection between Operations Research and the macroeconomic field of econometrics in chairs, conferences and publications is explained and problematized. The great flood of publications on the subject of Operations Research between 1960 and 1980 is referred to, but the rise of the competing field of business informatics in the 1980s halted the success of Operations Research. Based on the historical study by Alexander Nützenadel, the difference between the field of econometrics, which is based on empirical data, and the field of operations research, which is more academically oriented, is worked out. The methodological approach of Operations Research is referred to as abstractification. An example for abstractification is the transport model of linear optimization, which simplifies (abstractifies) economic reality to such an extent that it can be transformed into manageable formulas. However, the transport model is unsuitable for applications in the real economy and thus serves only as a self-referential project for the academic sector. This contribution shows that Operations Research lacks the level of empirical implementation of mathematical models known from econometrics and the social sciences. How transport optimization was taken up in the political knowledge cultures of the Eastern bloc (1945 – 1990) and in the German Democratic Republic is dealt with in a section.