The Deliberative Context of Systems Analysis

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the theoretical foundations of the investigational practice of Operational Research and Applied Systems Analysis (ORASA). It describes what constitutes an adequate description of ORASA. At an early stage in the history of ORASA, a potent subsidiary theme emerged—an enquiry into mathematical and computational problems posed by some types of model produced by some types of investigation. The second subsidiary theme was that ORASA is only a tantalizingly short step away from a science of decision making. In the United States, Churchman and Ackoff wrote extensively toward this goal, and in countries with a Marxist constitution, the hope for a good scientific outcome to human problems is often an explicit article of faith. The third subsidiary theme was that ORASA as a social process would only be satisfactorily described if it was reconceptualized in terms of the behavioral and social sciences.