The Power of Words: Management Science vs. Scientific Management

The terms Management Science and Scientific Management are semantically identical, but different management practices. Operations Management as a discipline identifies its “modern” incarnation as dating from the 1960s when it became more rigorous and managerially focused. F. W. Taylor’s Shop Management laid its foundations sixty years before but Scientific Management had stagnated by the 1950s. At that point, the rise of Management Science both reinvigorated Operations Management and threatened it with a competing new discipline: Operations Research. In modernizing Operations Management redefined itself, reasserting its interest in several areas and co-opting Operational Research tools for those. It also contracted, withdrawing from areas that were considered vocational, or more suited to Industrial Engineering. One aspect of this retrenchment was its jettison of Scientific Management; though that remained dominant philosophically and many practitioners continued with its practice. More significantly, the...