The intellectual journey of Russell Ackoff: from OR apostle to OR apostate

Abstract

Russell Ackoff has had a distinguished career in operational research both as an academic and practitioner. His influence on the development of the discipline in the US and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s was considerable. Yet during the 1970s Ackoff registered increasing disillusion with the course and conduct of OR on both sides of the Atlantic. His rejection of the established mathematical paradigm and appeal for a wider social and political remit for the discipline was writ large at the UK Operational Research Society's conference in 1978. This paper, stimulated by the author's research into the history of British OR, analyses the evolution of Ackoff's thought in order to explain the sources of his disillusion and the short and longer term reactions to his recantation.

Keywords:

• history of OR/MS
• OR/MS methodology

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for comments received on this paper at the IFORS Conference, Edinburgh, 2002. I also thank Norman Lawrie, Heiner Muller-Merbach, Mike Pidd, and Graham Rand for their critical insights. I am especially grateful to Ken Bowen and an anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.