Ops Research as Social Science

In looking back on the development and uses of science in the 20th century, one of the themes that emerges is the growing ability to scale the creation and application of science. Science before the industrial revolution was often tied up in the craft based professions and experiential systems of transferring knowledge from generation to generation. Agriculture, mining, metalwork and the other initial scientific endeavors were built on small groups of individual craftsmen or artisans. The educational systems of pre-industrial civilization were closely tied to the privileged for skills such as mathematics and writing and philosophy and critical thinking, while accumulated knowledge such as farming and animal husbandry was passed on through apprenticeships or years of performing tasks. As cultures began to depend more on technology, science had to learn to scale the transfer of knowledge to wider circles of society and start developing methods of recording and educating more and more people. The history of science is in many ways tied to our ability to institutionalize what has already been learned. At the start of the industrial age, we learned that invention was mostly the work of individual inventors who accumulated enough cross disciplinary knowledge to make breakthroughs in technology. Once the breakthrough had been made industry could learn to apply it and distribute it to society. Carlson describes the work of Edison and Bell as examples of these inventors. As they created new technologies, they then focused on the operational aspect of manufacturing equipment, which became the artifacts that influenced the greater society.

In Mendelsohn and Porter, we were shown how government or society coops these ideas for the benefit of the greater society. Mendelsohn touches on the invention of the science of Operations Research, where scientific method is applied to systems of behavior and human endeavor, not just to natural phenomenon or to physical inventions. At this point the study of science begins to take shape. I believe the work done in World War II on Operations Research laid the foundations for the modern social scientists who do Science and Technology Studies and investigate the interaction of social systems and new technologies. The application of science to concepts of warfare is certainly more application specific than the current questions investigating how new technologies will drive social changes and how new technologies are at the intersection of society and science, but the study of how war was executed using new technologies and how even newer solutions could be used to counter those tactics, harkens to modern ideas of co-production and social construction. Personally, I have always been fascinated by the Operations work done in Design of Experiments during this age which gave us the first systems of multi-variable analysis and helped the war effort through economic and production optimization. These tools allowed science to develop systems that accelerate the formulation of questions and the identification of key gaps in knowledge that drive more rapid achievement. Science and Technology Studies can take these lessons and utilize them in the current environment of complex interdisciplinary research and social interaction with emerging technologies.