The mangle of OR practice: towards more informative case studies of ‘technical’ projects

Abstract

Case studies of interventions involving ‘technical’ OR have traditionally been published in the style of scientific papers. Most are well written and technically sound but few explain the process of intervention, the story of what actually happened. Those interested in the process of OR would like know about the organizational hurdles that had to be surmounted, the changes in direction that were made, the influences of the people involved and technology available on the path taken. The physicist turned sociologist Andrew Pickering has suggested that by conceiving scientific practice as a dynamic process of intertwined elements a more insightful account is obtained, leading to a better understanding and giving rise to more interesting questions. In order to explore this claim the paper describes an OR project that already features in the OR literature, and then discusses it in terms of Pickering’s concept of the mangle of practice. The project examined is the development and use of a model of the UK energy market. The mangle perspective places the emphasis on the interaction through time of material, human and conceptual components of a research programme. It is concluded that the concept of mangle can indeed help case writers produce a more realistic description and help them make better sense of what occurred. Such cases could provide a useful source of material for some academic research programmes.

Keywords:

• case studies
• sociology of practice
• actor-network theory
• the nature of OR
• energy modelling

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their help in improving the paper.