The Death of the Expert

Abstract

The texts of OR are littered, explicitly and implicitly, with myths about the ‘expert’ that are taken for self-evident truths. We would like to challenge these. This paper presents arguments following a postmodern route which views the world as text, where all phenomena and events can be regarded as text and, as such, subject to narrative analysis. Narrative analysis explodes and disperses text to reveal forms and codes according to which meanings are possible. The paper will introduce a case study drawing on our experiences in community OR, which we aim to use to demonstrate this approach.

Keywords:

• Community OR
• Methodology
• Postmodernism
• Practice of OR