Frameworks of Inquiry: OR Practice Across the Hard—Soft Divide

The growing interest in understanding the practice of OR has, not unnaturally, tended to concentrate upon experience with those ‘soft’ methodologies which address both process and content management issues. This paper uses a detailed account of one practitioner's work in a ‘traditional’ area of OR (linear programming) to demonstrate how process-related issues are handled there, and argues that more extensive reporting of such conventional practice is essential for the health of the discipline. In particular, it suggests that an emphasis on discussing the development of working relationships between OR practitioners and their clients might usefully supplant the contemporary emphasis on the ‘project’.