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mburnamfink 's review for:
Rational Action is an often fascinating, frequently frustrating, close history of operations research from 1940 to 1960. Operations research is a fascinating branch of applied interdisciplinary mathematics, using clever and often counterintuitive logic and statistics to reveal useful facts. This history traces many applications of operations research, and attempts to formalize it as a field of knowledge bridging science, policy, and strategy. However, the micro-narratives, approximately 30 very short chapters, are only belated brought into conversation with the larger issues in science and technology studies.
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Operations research has its origins in attempts to figure out the new form of technologically mediated warfare in the opening exchanges of World War 2. British policy-makers, reeling from the defeat of the Battle of France, realized that this war of radar intercepts and submarine hunts worked differently from traditional military virtues. While heroism still mattered, efficient application of a system of military technologies was the surest path to victory. In a bright spot in British policy-making, a rather ad hoc scientific advisory structure managed to extract useful lessons from operations and transmit new best practices to units in the field. American operations research had a different bureaucratic structure, with particular embeddings in bomber wings, but managed similar feats of efficient mission planning.
With victory in 1945, operations researchers faced the challenges of peace. British Marxists J.D. Bernal and J.B.S. Haldane saw their work as prelude to scientific management of the economy. Their less ideological American counterparts saw operations research as a way to rationalize an unruly consumer economy and inter-service debates over strategy.
In the years following the war, RAND would become the center of gravity of operations research, using Air Force funding to develop a style of systems analysis and game-theoretic approaches to nuclear war that proved publically influential. 1960 is as good of end as any, but in some respects the story is cut short before it gets really interesting, with the triple whammy of Eisenhower's Farewell Address warning of capture by a scientific-military elite, the installation of McNamara's Whiz Kids in the Pentagon, and the absurdist failure of operations research in the political warfare of Vietnam.
The coda links back to the social studies of science movement, Shapin, Latour, and Jasanoff, which is in many way a reaction to the perceived universal objectivity of the operations researchers, and the collapse of the High Modernist project in the 1960s. Thomas avoids the simple oppositional narrative by showing the successes of operations research as contingent, based on personal connections with decision-makers and presenting reasonable options in a wartime environment of great uncertainty, rather than a synoptic mathematical authority. But I think this project gets too lost in the weeds, chasing the complex mathematical theories of operations research without making enough connection to their project of rationalizing policy via mathematical models.
This picture seems to get a lot of positive attention whenever it's posted.
Operations research has its origins in attempts to figure out the new form of technologically mediated warfare in the opening exchanges of World War 2. British policy-makers, reeling from the defeat of the Battle of France, realized that this war of radar intercepts and submarine hunts worked differently from traditional military virtues. While heroism still mattered, efficient application of a system of military technologies was the surest path to victory. In a bright spot in British policy-making, a rather ad hoc scientific advisory structure managed to extract useful lessons from operations and transmit new best practices to units in the field. American operations research had a different bureaucratic structure, with particular embeddings in bomber wings, but managed similar feats of efficient mission planning.
With victory in 1945, operations researchers faced the challenges of peace. British Marxists J.D. Bernal and J.B.S. Haldane saw their work as prelude to scientific management of the economy. Their less ideological American counterparts saw operations research as a way to rationalize an unruly consumer economy and inter-service debates over strategy.
In the years following the war, RAND would become the center of gravity of operations research, using Air Force funding to develop a style of systems analysis and game-theoretic approaches to nuclear war that proved publically influential. 1960 is as good of end as any, but in some respects the story is cut short before it gets really interesting, with the triple whammy of Eisenhower's Farewell Address warning of capture by a scientific-military elite, the installation of McNamara's Whiz Kids in the Pentagon, and the absurdist failure of operations research in the political warfare of Vietnam.
The coda links back to the social studies of science movement, Shapin, Latour, and Jasanoff, which is in many way a reaction to the perceived universal objectivity of the operations researchers, and the collapse of the High Modernist project in the 1960s. Thomas avoids the simple oppositional narrative by showing the successes of operations research as contingent, based on personal connections with decision-makers and presenting reasonable options in a wartime environment of great uncertainty, rather than a synoptic mathematical authority. But I think this project gets too lost in the weeds, chasing the complex mathematical theories of operations research without making enough connection to their project of rationalizing policy via mathematical models.