European Journal of Operational Research 249 (2016) 806–815

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European Journal of Operational Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ejor

An outlook on behavioural OR – Three tasks, three pitfalls, one definition

Kai Helge Becker∗
Science & Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), 2 George Street, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In their recent paper, Hämäläinen, Luoma, and Saarinen (2013) have made a strong case for the importance
Received 15 December 2014 of Behavioural OR. With the motivation to contribute to a broad academic outlook in this emerging disci-
Accepted 28 September 2015
pline, this rather programmatic paper intends to further the discussion by describing three types of research
Available online 3 October 2015
tasks that should play an important role in Behavioural OR, namely a descriptive, a methodological and a
Keywords: technological task. Moreover, by relating Behavioural OR to similar academic endeavours, three potential pit-
Behavioural OR falls are presented that Behavioural OR should avoid: (1) a too narrow understanding of what “behavioural”
Interdisciplinary means, (2) ignorance of interdisciplinary links, and (3) a development without close connection with the core
Social sciences disciplines of OR. The paper concludes by suggesting a definition of Behavioural OR that sums up all points
Organizations addressed.
Hard and soft OR © 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.

1. Introduction
Since its inception, Operational Research (OR) has been success-
ful at finding solutions for a wealth of practical problems, often pi-
oneering novel and sophisticated analytical techniques for difficult
and complex decision problems. For practitioners in the field it has
always been obvious that the application of these OR techniques and
the implementation of their results in a concrete real-world setting
poses challenges on its own – challenges that go beyond the analyti-
cal sophistication of OR methods and are related to the “human fac-
tor” in decision-making. Only rarely, however, have these behavioural
challenges led to research in the field of OR that systematically ad-
dresses them, with the exception of a few single contributions (such
as Richels, 1981), some of the papers presented at two conferences on
“OR and the Social Sciences” in 1964 and 1989 (Jackson et al., 1989;
Lawrence, 1966) and more regular contributions within some OR sub-
disciplines, such as Decision Analysis (based on the seminal results
of Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, for example) and Problem Structuring
Methods (e.g. Rosenhead & Mingers, 2001).
Recently, there has been an increased interest in behavioural is-
sues related to Operations Research. In a paper in the European Jour-
nal of Operational Research, Hämäläinen, Luoma, and Saarinen (2013)
have made a strong case for the need of a new sub-discipline Be-
havioural Operational Research that explicitly studies “behavioural as-
pects related to the use of Operational Research (OR) methods in
modelling, problem solving and decision support” (Hämäläinen et al.,
2013: 623), and the 20th IFORS conference in Barcelona in 2014
∗
Tel.: +61 409 340 336.
E-mail address: Kai.Becker@qut.edu.au, home@kai.de
featured the first stream of papers on Behavioural OR. The present
paper intends to make a programmatic contribution that may enrich
the discussion about the focus and direction that this newborn mem-
ber of the family of OR sub-disciplines could take. In particular, it is
motivated by the wish to contribute to a broad academic outlook of
the newly emerging discipline, especially regarding its research ques-
tions, its research paradigms, and its links with both neighbouring
academic disciplines outside OR and other fields within OR. Accord-
ingly, it brings together a diversity of lines of enquiries, research pro-
grams, perspectives and paradigms from various strands of academia
to offer a panorama view on existing and possible future research in
Behavioural OR and to demonstrate the merits and rich potential of a
broad perspective on Behavioural OR.
The remainder of the paper is structured into three parts. The next
section will address three types of research foci that could play an
important role in Behavioural OR. On this basis, the following sec-
tion relates Behavioural OR to similar academic endeavours in other
academic fields and presents three potential pitfalls that Behavioural
OR should avoid. The paper concludes by suggesting a definition of
Behavioural OR that sums up all points addressed.
2. Three tasks of Behavioural OR
We will begin by considering the aims of Behavioural OR. The
study of aspects of human behaviour in general has a long academic
tradition that has led to the emergence of a variety of social sciences,
such as economics, management studies, psychology, sociology, po-
litical science, anthropology and cultural studies, just to mention a
few. Any serious approach to studying human behaviour in the con-
text of OR methods therefore necessarily has an interdisciplinary ori-
entation and cannot ignore concepts, methods and insights of the

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2015.09.055
0377-2217/© 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.
 K.H. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 249 (2016) 806–815
social sciences. The rich history of the social sciences provides a basis
for a diverse array of potential topics for research in Behavioural OR.
As with all interdisciplinary endeavours, there are two ways in
which an academic discipline A can advance by making contact with
a discipline (or set of disciplines) B:
(1) discipline A can draw on concepts, methods or insights from disci-
pline B by using them within its own core paradigms of research,
and
(2) researchers of discipline A can step out of the traditional
paradigms of their own discipline and assume the perspective of
researchers of discipline B, with the intention to shed light, “from
the outside”, on problems and concerns that discipline A faces.
For Behavioural OR, approach (1) means developing new analyti-
cal methods that incorporate aspects of human behaviour to enable
decision makers to arrive at better decisions. Examples for this type
of research can be found in agent-based modelling (e.g. Tesfatsion,
2003), for example, in game-theoretical approaches from economics
to analyze decision situations (e.g. Kittsteiner & Molduvanu, 2005),
in the principal-agent models of economics that consider the con-
sequences of information asymmetries to determine (under certain
strict Behavioural assumptions) optimal incentive structures (e.g.
Eisenhardt, 1989), in elaborated ways of modelling preferences to
arrive at better decision analytic methods (Roy, 1996), and in the
psychological underpinning of problem structuring methods such as
SODA (Eden & Ackermann, 2001).
In approach (2), the operations researcher builds on concepts,
methods and insights of the social sciences by assuming the role of a
social scientist. The relevance of this approach for Behavioural OR lies
in the fact that OR interventions, i.e. the application of OR techniques
in a concrete practical setting, are a type of human behaviour and
therefore susceptible to being studied via the concepts and methods
of the social sciences. Carrying out Behavioural OR against the back-
ground of this perspective on OR interventions means studying the
way in which human behaviour and human interactions1 shape and
are shaped by the use of OR techniques.
Following this approach (2) is clearly a challenging task. Stepping
out of well-known paradigms of one’s own discipline to look at OR in-
terventions via a social science perspective cannot be done casually,
but requires serious interdisciplinary work, and as such it is suscepti-
ble to all typical problems of interdisciplinary endeavours. However,
if the discipline of OR would like to make progress in understand-
ing the behavioural side of its methods and techniques, it can nei-
ther hope to be able to develop, one day, a genuinely new perspective
on behavioural phenomena on its own, i.e. a perspective that can do
without existing social scientific expertise, nor wait for the social sci-
ences to carry out this type of research on its behalf – particularly
if this type of research is ultimately intended to foster OR’s agenda
of modelling, problem solving and decision support. Fortunately, as
we will see in Sections 3.1 and 3.2, Behavioural OR is not alone with
this this interdisciplinary challenge; there are role models in some
sub-fields of OR and in closely related disciplines that Behavioural
OR can follow and draw on. But at first, for the remainder of this sec-
tion, let us have a look at the three highly relevant tasks or avenues of
research for Behavioural OR that this approach of studying OR tech-
niques from a social science perspective has to offer to the discipline
of OR as a whole.
(i) As OR is concerned with solving real-life decision problems,
it is important to gain, on a descriptive level, theoretical and
1
Here and in the following, we will occasionally refer to “human interactions” in
conjunction with, or in lieu of, the term “human behaviour” to emphasize that Be-
havioural OR should not only focus on the behaviour of individuals, but also on the
interactions between several individuals and the interplay between the use of OR tech-
niques and individuals. As OR is primarily carried out in organizations, this wider focus
is indispensable for the practical relevance of Behavioural OR.
807
empirical insights into the behavioural implications of the use
of OR techniques. This means first to study the impact of OR
methods on organizations. Given that OR aims at being “The
Science of Better”, it is surprising how little research there has
been that empirically and critically investigates the question
of the consequences for the functioning of organizations that
result from applying OR methods. One of the few articles that
can serve as an example for further research is a recent em-
pirical study by Cabantous, Gond, and Johnson-Cramer (2010)
that looks at the way in which decision analysis imparts ratio-
nality to organizations. There is a broad variety of useful re-
search questions that are of relevance for the OR practitioner.
Research of this type could, for example, shed light on the be-
havioural challenges that may result from implementing the
solutions of mathematical models within an organization (see
Ackoff, 1960; Geisler, 1966; and Ratoosh, 1966, for early re-
search of this type) or could examine the potential behavioural
consequences (such as a shift in power relations or a change
in the distribution of, and the access to, information within a
company) that may arise from new quantitative descriptions
for aspects of organizational processes that were formerly not
amenable to quantitative analysis, or it could address the con-
sequences of the tendency of some methods of utility opti-
mization to lead to “postdecision surprises” (Harrison & March,
1984; Smith & Winkler, 2006).
Second, research of this type would study the impact that be-
havioural aspects have on the use of OR methods, including
their successes and failures. Also this is a surprisingly under-
researched area. For optimizing train schedules in transporta-
tion systems, for example, it is relevant to be aware of the fact
that people make their travel decisions not only on the basis
of travel preferences (departure time, travel time, number of
connections, etc.), but are also influenced by the design of the
map of the public transport system (Guo, 2011). In organiza-
tions, behavioural aspects can prevent OR methods from being
used. Loch, Pich, Terwiesch, and Urbschat (2001), for example,
present a case study that describes a carefully executed OR in-
tervention, in which the resulting Mathematical Programming
model was in the end not used by the organization due to the
organizational change this would have implied. A better un-
derstanding of these and other phenomena could help signif-
icantly to improve the benefits of OR. Research of this type
could also shed light on some “dark spots” in the application
of OR methods in organizations, such as the purposeful abuse
of models by exploiting the image of the objectivity of math-
ematical models to support a certain organizational agenda,
or problems that may be caused by limited quantitative abil-
ities or the incompetent application of OR methods (cf. Brown,
2005; Cronin, Gonzales, & Sterman, 2009), or ethical dilemmas
that OR practitioners encounter (cf. Taket, 1994).
Third, bringing the aspects of the previous two points together,
research that aims at investigating on a descriptive level the
behavioural side of the use of OR would also have a lot at how
the process of using OR methods is shaped by the mutual inter-
play between OR techniques and human interaction within an
organizational context. In research on information technology,
this is interplay has been studied under the notion of the “du-
ality of technology” (Orlikowski, 1992). For OR, studying the
“duality of models” would help operations researchers to carry
out OR interventions more effectively. With respect to Prob-
lem Structuring Methods, White (2009) has made a convincing
case for research that falls into this category.
(ii) As the application of OR in a real-world organization can be
challenging (Mitchell, 1993), OR practitioners would benefit
from research that provides, on the level of OR methodology,
concepts that allow for reflecting on the use of OR techniques
808 K.H. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 249 (2016) 806–815
in concrete practical settings. These concepts would typically
be grounded in the type of descriptive research addressed in
the previous item (1) and/or on more general concepts and
insights from the social sciences. An early example of this
type of research is a study by the German management re-
searcher Drumm (1984; see also Drumm & Scholz, 1986) who
used questionnaires and interviews to determine five criteria
that are necessary for the acceptance of quantitative methods
in human resource planning (covering aspects such as power,
technical competence, how pressing the problem is, and that
new methods may threaten people’s competence). Research of
this type provides OR practitioners with guidelines that help
them to reflect on their praxis and to arrive a successful out-
come of an OR intervention. Another useful example is a re-
cent article by Franco (2013), who describes, based on two case
studies, the different types of roles and effects that OR models
can have on organizations, highlighting the syntactic, semantic
and pragmatic aspects of modelling. While focusing on Soft OR
interventions, the concepts presented in the article are useful
for quantitative, “hard” applications of OR, too.
(iii) Research in Behavioural OR would not reach its fully potential
if it did not stimulate, on the technological level, the develop-
ment of novel or improved OR techniques. We have already
addressed in approach (1) above the potential for improving
models by incorporating concepts and insights from the so-
cial sciences. In the context of items (i) and (ii) of approach
(2) that we are discussing here, there is another way in which
Behavioural OR can lead to improved OR techniques, namely
by taking into account the behavioural consequences that re-
search of the type (i) and (ii) sheds light on. This leads to mod-
els and techniques that are better adapted to the behavioural
context in which they are used, even when they do not explic-
itly model human behaviour and interactions.
Research of this type would lead to OR techniques that
may focus on aspects such as robustness, convenience of use,
implementability, end-user transparency or technological ac-
ceptance in addition to analytical precision. The community
of Problem Structuring Methods has long been aware of the
importance of the behavioural issues involved in OR inter-
ventions, and a major contribution of Behavioural OR could
be to foster systematically the development of corresponding
quantitative techniques that take into account that OR is typ-
ically carried out in a social context (Rosenhead & Mingers,
2001). An interesting example in research on vehicle rout-
ing, which, even though it is based on practitioners’ expe-
rience rather than social scientific research, may serve as
an illustration here: optimal mathematical solutions to rout-
ing problems may not find acceptance by practitioners due
to behavioural aspects related to their practical implementa-
tion. This has led to the development of OR techniques that
yield sub-optimal, but “visually attractive” solutions to routing
problems, i.e. techniques that include additional constraints
to ensure that the solutions are geographically compact, non-
overlapping and have little intra-route crossover (e.g. Hollis &
Green, 2012).
In total, we have identified and illustrated three tasks for Be-
havioural OR: to investigate on a descriptive level the interplay be-
tween the use of OR techniques and human behaviour and interac-
tions; to provide, on the methodological level, concepts that allow for
reflecting on the use of OR techniques in concrete practical settings;
and to stimulate, on a technological level, the development of novel or
improved OR techniques. In the latter case we have seen that these
techniques either may integrate behavioural aspects into the model
or, not less importantly, may be adapted to the behavioural context in
which they are used.
3. Three pitfalls that Behavioural OR should avoid
The previous section aimed at providing a broad outlook on Be-
havioural OR by addressing various types of research where the
discipline of OR would benefit from taking into account behavioural
aspects. In this section we will have a look at three pitfalls that
could prevent the newly emerging discipline of Behavioural OR from
achieving a broad outlook. We will begin by having a closer look at
research in the social sciences.
3.1. Pitfall 1: a too narrow understanding of what “behavioural” means
While the core of the OR discipline has developed primarily in
close contact with disciplines such as mathematics, statistics, com-
puter science and engineering, OR has also always had close ties
with the social sciences, among these particularly economics and, to
a much lesser extent, psychology. If, however, we wish to become
aware of the full potential of Behavioural OR we must not overlook
that research about human behaviour is carried out by a variety of so-
cial sciences other than economics and psychology (such as manage-
ment studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, cultural stud-
ies, etc.) not all of which are solely based on historical roots similar to
those of OR. In fact, one of the main characteristics of the disciplines
that study human behaviour is that they draw on both of the two
intellectual traditions (or “two cultures” in the famous words of the
British scientist and novelist Snow, 1959) that constitute academia,
namely the sciences and the humanities, while the roots of OR can
predominantly, albeit not exclusively, be found in the tradition of the
sciences.
The position of the social sciences between the sciences and the
humanities opens up a multi-paradigmatic wealth of perspectives
and fascinating research questions that can enrich our tool set for
modelling, problem solving and decision support in OR. To illustrate
the variety of approaches that can be found within the broad spec-
trum of perspectives in the social sciences, this section sketches five
different paradigms of studying human behaviour, each of which is
of central importance for larger number of disciplines in the social
sciences. Apart from their general relevance in the social sciences,
the approaches presented in the following have also been chosen due
to their particular relevance for researchers who study management
and organizations and because their diversity serves well at illustrat-
ing the wide range of approaches to analyzing human behaviour that
can be found in the social sciences.
3.1.1. Behaviour as choice
This approach of conceptualizing human behaviour is probably
the most well-known in the OR community. In its classical form, this
approach can be found in the large body of work in microeconomics
that uses quantitative models of rational choice in the utilitarian tra-
dition (e.g. Becker, 1976). In these publications, a typical aim is to ex-
plain economic (i.e. social) phenomena by referring to the behaviour
of individuals in terms of utility functions, which have a determin-
istic or probabilistic character similar to the quantitative laws in the
natural, and to “environmental” factors such as other individuals rep-
resented by utility functions or a set of resources that also follow cer-
tain quantitative laws. In these models human cognitive processes are
reduced to individuals attaching quantitative values (utilities) to par-
ticular resources or outcomes, and all social phenomena are to be ex-
plained with recourse to individual decisions (so-called methodolog-
ical individualism, cf. Rutherford, 1996: 27–50; Berger, 1963). In the
OR community, this approach of conceptualizing human behaviour
has frequently been used for modelling, such as in game theoreti-
cal models, or as a normative ideal in Decision Analysis, for exam-
ple, but has also been applied with a stronger behavioural interest,
namely as a basis for empirical experiments about the way in which
 K.H. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 249 (2016) 806–815
people solve OR problems (see e.g. Schweitzer & Cachon, 2000, for
the newsvendor problem).
This classical approach has been extended significantly over the
past decades, mainly due to a better understanding of the bound-
aries of rational choice and the insight that human behaviour can-
not be reduced to studying utility functions. Research that follows
the behaviour-as-choice paradigm can roughly be divided into two
streams, both of which have their historical origin in the semi-
nal work by Simon (1949), which was intended to overcome the
limitations of the classical economic perspective. One stream fo-
cusses on studying the “boundedness” of human rationality, either
by studying deviations from rational behaviour or by exploring al-
ternative ways to describe and formalize human decision making
(see Katsikopoulos, 2014, for an overview). While this first stream
has strong connections mainly with economics and psychology, the
second stream, within Management Studies, has also taken up ideas
from sociology. Similar to the first stream, it tends to focus on indi-
vidual decisions as the main unit of analysis (methodological indi-
vidualism), but right from the outset, this approach also aimed at go-
ing beyond the level of individual behaviour, incorporating insights
into aspects of management and organizations that transcend indi-
vidual actors. Moreover, going beyond the idea of utility functions
and optimization models that shapes the first stream, it also takes
into account the complex meaningful mental processes that under-
lie decision-making and sheds light on aspects of ambiguity and in-
terpretation involved in decision-making processes (cf. March, 1994:
chapter 5; Brunsson, 1985), thereby opening this stream of research
to the so-called “interpretative” and “institutional” approaches that
we will consider in the following subsections. Ultimately, this sec-
ond stream of research even questions classical notions of bounded
rationality by pointing out, for example, that decisions may follow a
“logic of appropriateness” instead of a “logic of consequences” (e.g.
March & Olsen, 1998). Researchers in OR have so far primarily drawn
on approaches from the first stream of research, namely in the area of
decision analysis (e.g. Morton & Fasolo, 2009). Future research could
study, for example, decision processes in OR interventions in general,
i.e. beyond decision analysis, and build on this paradigm to add new
behavioural components to mathematical models.
3.1.2. Behaviour as the outcome of processes of sense-making
Another approach to studying social phenomena consists in ana-
lyzing human behaviour as the results of processes of sense-making.
Proponents of this approach contend that there is a fundamental
difference between human behaviour and the material phenomena
that the natural sciences study because humans, when acting, inter-
pret the world and impart meaning to it on the basis of the cogni-
tive schemes and patterns they have become accustomed to. Con-
sequently, advocates of these so-called interpretative approaches (cf.
David, 2010, and Weick, 1995, for an overview with respect to be-
haviour in organizations) do not aim at finding laws that govern hu-
man behaviour and can explain or even predict it. Instead, they focus
on adequately describing, analyzing and interpreting the processes
by which human beings make sense of the world and that allow
them to engage in meaningful interactions and deal with the situ-
ations they encounter. By analyzing the mental (i.e. cognitive) pro-
cesses by which individuals create meaning, these approaches con-
tribute to a deeper understanding of the cultural layers of meaning
that can be found in everyday behaviour within and outside organi-
zations, in particular in human interactions.
There exists a large variety of interpretative approaches, with in-
tellectual roots going back for a century, such as Herbert Blumer’s
symbolic interactionism, Alfred Schuetz’s sociological phenomenol-
ogy or Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, just to name a few. In
the OR community, also these ideas have so far been taken up primar-
ily in the context of “soft OR”, namely approaches such as Strategic
Options Development and Analysis (e.g. Eden, 1989) and Soft Systems
809
Methodology (e.g. Checkland, 1981; cf. Mingers, 1984, for a critique).
It would be a highly relevant task for further research in Behavioural
OR to apply this perspective to studying the interactions between
people in processes of building and using mathematical models in
quantitatively-oriented OR interventions.
3.1.3. Behaviour as shaped by institutions
Another approach, which is known as sociological neo-
institutionalism, analyzes social phenomena (in particular orga-
nizations) by studying social institutions, i.e. mechanisms of social
order that comprise of complexes of roles, positions, expectations,
rules and values, to understand how they shape human behaviour.
These institutions may have legal components (such as contracts
and laws), but primarily consist of normative and cognitive rules and
patterns that provide actors with a framework of how to conceptu-
alize reality and of how to act (Scott, 2001). Similar to interpretative
approaches, with which sociological neo-institutionalism shares
some of its intellectual heritage (e.g. Berger & Luckmann, 1966),
this strand of research is not interested in finding laws that govern
human behaviour, but aims at gaining a rich understanding of the
various layers of meaning and interpretation that shape human
behaviour. However, in contrast to interpretative approaches, it does
not primarily focus on analyzing social phenomena as the outcome
of individual decisions or behaviour, but as the result of societal in-
stitutions that “materialize” in the way organizations are structured.
Research of this type has shown, for example, that certain aspects
of organizations can best be explained by institutionalized norms
and cognitive schemes that confront organizations with societal
expectations.
The author of this paper is not aware of any current application
of this (or a similar) perspective within the OR community. However,
research in accounting that investigated the way in which organiza-
tions have adopted particular accounting concepts and methods to
comply with institutionalized expectations of rationality by their en-
vironment (see Chapman, Cooper, & Miller, 2009: 12–14, for a brief
introduction), suggests that approaches in this tradition have a poten-
tial to guide research in Behavioural OR. Research of this type could,
for example, shed light on the reasons why organizations seek OR in-
terventions and what the consequences of these are for the form and
functioning of organizations.
3.1.4. Behaviour as statements within a discourse
Researchers who employ this approach look at the nexus of social
phenomena as a discourse or text, i.e. as a structured web of inter-
woven meaningful signs and symbols. In studying written texts, con-
versations and other communicative events, proponents of this ap-
proach work on uncovering concepts, paradigms and ideologies that,
explicitly or implicitly, permeate these discourses and on giving a rich
understanding of the semantic forces that drive them. In research on
management and organizations, for example, there exists a stream of
research called critical discourse analysis that looks at management
phenomena as part of a textual chain of events by employing various
means of linguistic textual analysis. Topics of research in this stream
include the formation of organizational strategies, collaboration be-
tween organizations and behaviour in the workplace, for example
(see Grant, Idema, & Oswick, 2011, for a short introduction).
This approach of studying social phenomena is, in a certain sense,
diametrically opposed to analyzing human behaviour as a result of
individual rational choice. Instead of studying individual behaviour,
discourse analysis focuses on analyzing the discourses themselves.
In doing so, it studies how these are semantically structured by con-
cepts, ideas, paradigms and ideologies that determine what can be
communicated reasonably within a certain discourse and what is ex-
cluded from it. Moreover, the cultural patterns within discourses are
even analyzed as a force that shapes actors, their identities and what
810 K.H. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 249 (2016) 806–815
they perceive as reasonable or rational. In other words, in this ap-
proach management practices are analyzed as being part of a net-
work of semantic events where the individual statements within a
discourse are considered as being shaped, to a great extent, by anony-
mous, supra-individual cultural patterns, or, in the words of Michel
Foucault, one of major theorists that developed this approach, by
“great anonymous strategies” (Foucault, 1976: 95). As a consequence,
this approach also has a strong focus on analyzing how discourses
establish and are formed by power relations (Foucault, 1980).
Another difference between this approach and a pure rational
choice approach consists in the fact that the discourse analytic strand
of research does not aim at explaining social phenomena via scientific
laws. Instead it aims at understanding, by careful textual analysis, the
relationships among concepts and notions within a discourse and the
inter-textual relations of a discourse with other discourses, and at un-
covering underlying semantic patterns, such as ideologies, that carry
through various texts.
In OR, this perspective and related ones have so far only been
taken notice of in the “soft OR” community (e.g. Brocklesby & Cum-
mings, 1996; Taket & White, 1993). In a thought-provoking text,
White and Taket (1994) have critically analyzed the notion of OR con-
sultants as experts, for example. With its critical interest, in particu-
lar by uncovering paradigms of thought or ideologies, research of this
type may appear to undermine the very basis of OR praxis; White
and Taket (1994) even advocate the “death” of the OR expert. How-
ever, what some may perceive as threatening can also be seen as an
invitation to question assumptions on OR praxis that were previously
taken for granted and as an opportunity to become a more reflective
OR practitioner, which may ultimately contribute to a “better” “Sci-
ence of Better” – even though this may not always be the primary
interest of proponents of these approaches. As the history of the sci-
ences and the humanities overwhelmingly demonstrates, academia
can only benefit from a critical examination of predominant, but un-
questioned concepts, ideas and paradigms. An interesting topic for
research in Behavioural OR that follows this approach would be to
study the way in which the mathematical OR discourse shapes the
managerial discourse within an organization during a (quantitative)
OR intervention.
3.1.5. Behaviour as carrying out social practices
The last approach that we will consider here is a family of related
theories called theories of social practices, which has developed on
the basis of various concepts from different theoretical roots in the
humanities (cf. Reckwitz, 2002; Nicolini, 2013), with the intention to
reconcile extreme paradigmatic positions in the social sciences (cf.
Bourdieu, 1984; Giddens, 1984). The main units of analysis in this ap-
proach are “practices”, i.e. bundles of routinized behaviour common
in a particular society or organization, such as the practice of calling a
meeting, of writing an email, or of reading a book. Theories of Social
Practices have a strong focus on understanding the layers of meaning
that are involved in carrying out practices, but they have also taken
up important aspects from approaches that aim at finding scientific
laws that govern behaviour, which has led to an emphasis on the ma-
terial aspects of human behaviour (e.g. resources) and empirical stud-
ies with a strong quantitative component, for example. The practice-
based strand of social theorizing has also tried to find some middle
ground between studying individual behaviour/interactions (as ra-
tional choice and interpretative approaches do) and analysing over-
arching cultural mechanisms (as discourse analysis does), namely by
investigating both the micro-activities that result from individual ac-
tors carrying out social practices and by studying these practices as
the very foundation of what constitutes actors, their identities and
competences in the first place. In fact, the general capability of The-
ories of Social Practices to go beyond traditional social-theoretical
dichotomies is one of the central aspects that has made them par-
ticularly innovative in management research (Feldman & Orlikowski,
2011). This approach has been used for a while for studying the use
of information technology in organizations (e.g. Orlikowski, 2000)
and other areas of management (see Nicolini, 2013, for an overview).
Within the OR community, a recent application of the practice-based
perspective sheds light on the practical challenges of decision ana-
lytic interventions (Becker, Montibeller, & Barcus, 2015), and, in an-
other paper, this approach has led to an analysis of a soft-OR interven-
tion (Paroutis, Franco, & Papadopoulos, 2015). Further research could
analyze, for example, the social practices that are carried out in orga-
nizations for building, implementing and actually using OR models.
We will end our journey through social scientific approaches
here, even though there would be many more approaches to explore,
such as neo-institutional microeconomics (e.g. Rutherford, 1996, cf.
Cordella, 2006, with respect to information systems), Luhmann’s The-
ory of Social Systems (e.g. Seidl & Becker, 2005) or Latour’s Actor
Network Theory (e.g. Latour, 2005), Habermas’ critical theory, which
stimulated “emancipatory systems thinking” (e.g. Ulrich, 1983) and
“critical systems thinking” (e.g. Jackson, 1985 , 1991; Mingers, 1980 ,
1992) in OR, or the various methodologies for empirical research that
can be associated with certain theoretical perspectives (e.g. Creswell,
2014, and Eden & Huxham, 1996; Ormerod, 2014, with a particular
relevance for OR case studies). For us here, it certainly suffices to have
obtained an idea of the diversity of perspectives that the position of
the social sciences between the sciences and the humanities entails.
It goes without saying that no researcher in Behavioural OR, and,
in fact, no social scientist, can be expected to be well-versed in sev-
eral of these paradigms of research. And certainly, with OR having
been shaped more strongly by perspectives that focus on individual
behaviour (as in rational choice approaches, for example) and hav-
ing a strong interest in formal models, the divide between the two
cultures of academia does imply a challenge for Behavioural OR (as
it does for many a social scientist!). But if Behavioural OR manages
to be open-minded and to embrace the richness of the social scien-
tific traditions it will be rewarded with a multi-paradigmatic wealth
of concepts, methods, insights and research questions that our tool
set for modelling, problem solving and decision support in OR will
certainly benefit from.
3.2. Pitfall 2: ignorance of interdisciplinary links
Since its inception, OR has been an interdisciplinary endeavour
and has had close contacts with disciplines such as Mathematics,
Statistics, Information Science, Engineering, Economics, Finance, Op-
erations Management and Accounting. The future development of
Behavioural OR will crucially depend not only on drawing on these
established interdisciplinary links, but even on expanding them. For
studying the behavioural aspects related to models and decision sup-
port, Behavioural OR does not have to start at square one. Many of
the disciplines that have stimulated OR over the past decades (and
that OR has stimulated in return) have in the meantime developed
sub-disciplines that are closely related to the research tasks of Be-
havioural OR and provide a wealth of ideas, concepts, methods and
insights that may give the emerging discipline of Behavioural OR a
head start on its journey (see Fig. 1). In the following we will have a
brief look at these sub-disciplines.
Organization Studies is an interdisciplinary sub-discipline of re-
search on management that is concerned with human behaviour, in-
cluding decision making, related to the form and functioning of or-
ganizations. Due to the fact that OR is typically carried out in orga-
nizations, the insights of Organization Studies are directly relevant
for research in Behavioural OR that is interested in how organiza-
tions shape and are shaped by the use of OR methods. Research about
organizations has been conducted for more than a century. During
this time scholars in Organization Studies have developed a wealth
of perspectives and methods that draw on both the sciences and the
humanities and have fruitfully employed the full spectrum of ap-
 K.H. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 249 (2016) 806–815
Mathemacs Philosophy
Philosophy/Sociology/Psychology
of Mathemacs
Computer Behavioural
Informaon
Science Systems Operaons
Research
Behavioural Economic
Decision Making Sociology
Psychology
Engineering
& Sociology
Fig. 1. Interdisciplinary links of Behavioural OR.
proaches in the social sciences, including all five paradigms of be-
haviour sketched in the previous section (see Clegg, 2010; Clegg &
Bailey, 2008; Hatch & Cunliffe, 2012, for an overview).
Behavioural Accounting2 is a sub-field of the discipline of Account-
ing that emerged in the 1970s on the basis of the insight that ac-
counting is not a set of neutral techniques, but involves actual peo-
ple in real organizations – an insight that was convincingly made
by a ground-breaking book by Hopwood (1974). The relation of Be-
havioural Accounting to the quantitative techniques of managerial
accounting could become a role-model for those researchers in Be-
havioural OR who are interested in studying from the perspective of
a social scientist the interplay between human interactions and OR
techniques (see Section 2). In this sense Behavioural Accounting is
a direct sister discipline of Behavioural OR, which may draw on the
decades of experience of this discipline, particularly when it is about
studying the behavioural implications of the methods of “hard OR”.
After an initial focus on behavioural aspects in a fashion similar to
research on behavioural decision making (see previous subsection),
this discipline has long developed a rich multi-paradigmatic perspec-
tive very similar to Organization Studies (see Chapman et al., 2009).
This is reflected in the diversity of publications in the flagship journal
Accounting, Organizations and Society, which even includes historical
research on how areas of society have been transformed by account-
ing practices (see Gendron & Baker, 2005, for insights into the his-
tory of the journal). Particularly relevant for Behavioural OR is that
the discipline broadened its scope more recently to studying “calcu-
lative practices” (Miller, 2001), i.e. a behavioural perspective on OR
techniques is, at least in principle, also of interest to researchers in
Behavioural Accounting.
Behavioural Operations Management, also referred to (in our con-
text misleadingly so) as Behavioural Operations Research, is a very re-
2
Due to the diversity of the field, there exists no generic term that encompasses
all social-science-related research in accounting. The term “behavioural accounting” is
frequently used by researchers that follow paradigms that are similar to the approach
of analyzing behaviour as choice. Research that employs other paradigms is occasion-
ally referred to as “organizational/sociological accounting”, but is often described by
a more specific term to indicate the particular approach more precisely. Researchers
that study “behaviour as statements within a discourse” may use the terms “critical
accounting” and “alternative accounting” to refer to their approaches (cf. Gendron &
Baker, 2005; Chapman et al., 2009; Baker 2011). In the following, we will use “be-
havioural accounting” as a generic term, for convenience of expression.
811
Management
Accounting
Studies
Organizaon Behavioural
Studies Accounng
Behavioural Operaons
Operaons Mgmt Management
Behavioural Behavioural
Economics Finance
Economics Finance
cent development and a sub-discipline of Operations Management
that is guided by interests similar to those that have led to the emer-
gence of Behavioural OR. The research undertaken has led to insights
into the way in which people deviate from rational behaviour in
the context of typical Operations Management decisions and pos-
sible ways of dealing with this (e.g. Becker-Peth, Katok, & Thone-
mann, 2013), for example. It has also investigated the question of
how rules of operations management affect human behaviour. Given
its origin in Operations Management this discipline focusses exclu-
sively on problems in the operations domain of companies. Despite
the obvious overlap between Operations Management and OR, as OR
focusses more on techniques that are generally applicable to com-
plex decision problems and not only on those in the operations do-
main, we can expect Behavioural OR, in contrast to Behavioural Op-
erations Management, to focus more on the behavioural aspects of
models and decision support in general than on specific organiza-
tional functions. Currently, research in Behavioural Operations Man-
agement is mainly of a type similar to behavioural decision mak-
ing. It remains to be seen whether this young discipline will develop
a broad outlook similar to Organization Studies and Behavioural
Accounting.
Behavioural Finance and Behavioural Economics are, as the names
suggest, sub-fields of Finance and Economics. They developed, par-
allel with the rise of behavioural decision making (see below in this
sub-section), but with a certain temporal delay compared with the
latter discipline (due to predominant paradigms that define what
characterizes “proper” research in Economics and Finance), out of the
insight that the utility functions in classical models do not adequately
describe the empirical reality of human behaviour and cannot explain
certain observed market inefficiencies (e.g. Bloomfield, 2008; Wilkin-
son & Klaes, 2012). Focusing on empirical research on deviations from
the model of rational decision making and their consequences, they
have had a strong impact of the development of the much younger
discipline of Behavioural Operations Management. Due to their inter-
est in model building these disciplines will be particularly insightful
for those researchers in Behavioural OR who seek to incorporate be-
havioural aspects directly into their models. Concepts and methods
of Behavioural Finance and Behavioural Economics may also be use-
ful for those interested in conducting quantitative empirical studies
in the tradition of “behaviour as choice” and/or experimental studies
of human behaviour (e.g. Ockenfels & Sadrieh, 2010).
812 K.H. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 249 (2016) 806–815
Economic Sociology is the branch of sociology that studies the
structure and processes of the economy as a subsystem of society,
i.e. as being embedded in the wider societal context (e.g. Swedberg,
2007). For Behavioural OR is may be relevant in so far as it might
inspire research that considers the wider societal impact of the use of
OR methods. With the multi-paradigmatic research in Economic So-
ciology covering most of the vast spectrum of approaches in the social
sciences (including the five paradigms outlined in the previous sub-
section), the contrast between economic sociology and economics
may also be instructive with respect to the way in which different
paradigms lead to different research foci and explanations for empir-
ical phenomena. In so far as research in Economic Sociology studies
the form and functioning of organizations it complements Organiza-
tion Studies by focusing less on a managerial perspective on organi-
zational phenomena (e.g. Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005). An interesting
sociological counterpart to Behavioural Finance is the sub-field called
Social Studies of Finance, which looks at financial markets from a so-
ciological perspective (e.g. Callon, 1998; MacKenzie & Millo, 2003).
Of particular relevance for Behavioural OR maybe the insights on
the impact of mathematical models on financial markets (MacKenzie,
2008).
Behavioural Decision Making is a sub-discipline of psychology that
has long studied the various psychological factors that characterize
human behaviour (cf. the description of the “behaviour-as-choice”
paradigm in the previous section) and has already found its way into
OR (e.g. Morton & Fasolo, 2009; von Winterfeldt & Edwards, 1986).
In their article on Behavioural OR, Hämäläinen et al. (2013) discuss
various ways in which the perspective and the results of this sub-
discipline are useful for Behavioural OR.
Information Systems is a long established discipline that is con-
cerned with the use of information and communication technology
(ICT) in the social context of organizations. In contrast to the focus
of disciplines such as Computer Science, the notion of an information
system goes beyond hardware and software and includes data, proce-
dures and people. Within the discipline there are two major strands
of research, namely a descriptive strand that studies the relation be-
tween ICT and the organizational and societal context and a design-
focused strand that is concerned with creating information systems
(Hevner, Park, & Ram, 2004).
With these research interests, the discipline of Information Sys-
tems covers the information system counterparts of all research
tasks for Behavioural OR that were discussed in Section 2 and, ad-
ditionally, those parts of OR that are concerned with the prac-
tical application of OR techniques (as opposed to those parts of
“pure” research in OR that focus on studying mathematical struc-
tures and developing algorithms for generic problems, as in the
fields of Combinatorial Optimization and Graph Theory, for exam-
ple). Moreover, the descriptive strand of research in Information Sys-
tems has a wide multi-paradigmatic perspective similar to Organiza-
tion Studies and Behavioural Accounting (cf. also Orlikowski & Barley,
2001).
For these reasons, the discipline of Information Systems can serve
as an impressive role-model for a comprehensive approach to the
behavioural aspects related to OR methods. Additionally, due to the
fact that algorithms (and hence ICT) are an essential part of OR, Be-
havioural OR can also directly benefit from various concepts, meth-
ods and insights of Information Systems, for instance those pertaining
to technology acceptance and implementation problems (e.g. Davis,
1989), to the intricate interplay of human behaviour and the mate-
rial reality of ICT (e.g. Leonardi et al., 2012; cf. also Eden, 1992, for
the impact of portable computers on OR), and to the way in which
technology governs social relationships (e.g. Kallinikos, Hasselbladh,
& Marton, 2013).
While it would be futile to attempt at providing a comprehen-
sive list of all interdisciplinary endeavours that maybe relevant for
Behavioural OR, let us briefly mention some small disciplines that re-
late to Mathematics, not by using or inventing new Mathematics, but
by studying it as an object of research. In these fields, such as the Phi-
losophy of Mathematics, the Sociology of Mathematics and the Psychol-
ogy of Mathematics (e.g. Bockarova et al., 2012; Hersh, 1997; Nesher &
Kilpatrick, 1990; Restivo, 1992), Mathematics is considered a human
activity or an object of human activity. Research in Behavioural OR
can draw on the results of this type of research to enrich our under-
standing of what a mathematical model is, what it means to do Math-
ematics and what cognitive processes are involved in using Mathe-
matics, which seems to be a promising perspective for studying the
behavioural aspects of the application of mathematical models to
practical problems in OR.
All in all, while being without any guarantee of comprehensive-
ness, our excursion to various fields in the vast universe of academia
should have illustrated the huge potential that lies for Behavioural
OR in drawing on the concepts, insights and methods of other, longer
established disciplines. We have seen that for all research tasks dis-
cussed in Section 2 and all social-theoretical paradigms outlined in
the previous subsection, there exist several role-models, paths that
have already been taken, perspectives that are useful for the disci-
pline of OR. Behavioural OR is not the only one of its kind; it is born
into a rich intellectual community.
3.3. Pitfall 3: developing without a close connection with the core
disciplines of OR
There is no guarantee of success for a newly emerging (sub-)
discipline. The history of science shows that the acceptance of new
approaches and paradigms does not only depend on their fruit-
fulness to shed light on previously obscure aspects of reality, but
also on more mundane aspects, such as the dissemination of re-
sults, the openness of peers, career options, and – in particularly
unfortunate cases – even on the passing of their adversaries (see
Kuhn, 1962).
What could be done to ensure that the discipline of Behavioural
OR will grow and prosper? Let us consider the situation of two sub-
disciplines related to Behavioural OR: Problem Structuring Methods
and Behavioural Accounting, both of which have been around for ap-
proximately 40 years, have a strong UK background and worked for
gaining acceptance in an academic environment dominated by pre-
scriptive quantitative approaches. Over these 40 years, the field of
Problem Structuring Methods has, without a doubt, been highly ac-
tive and successful in developing and refining OR methods for the
analysis of complex decision problems that complement traditional
quantitative approaches in “messy” settings where behavioural as-
pects are not negligible. Due to this research interest it has been a
pioneer, within OR, for a number of types of research questions and
paradigms that are also relevant for Behavioural OR. And yet, despite
an impressive record and its obvious practical relevance, the Prob-
lem Structuring Methods community is, unfortunately, comparably
small, and Problem Structuring Methods are not widely disseminated
outside the UK and are, in some circles, even considered as “not real
OR” (Mingers, 2011: 737), which prevents their publication in some
top journals. In contrast to this, Behavioural Accounting has a compa-
rably large international community with its own flagship A+ jour-
nal, as acknowledged by major international journal rankings, and
behavioural aspects of accounting are even addressed in textbooks
for the education provided by professional accounting bodies (e.g.
Kaplan, 2015).
The difference in the development of these sub-disciplines can
certainly not be attributed to a difference in quality or effort of re-
searchers in the fields. Instead there are structural reasons and his-
torical happenstances that have led to the different paths of the two
disciplines (Mingers, 2011). Behavioural Accounting has developed
in a somewhat easier environment since the degree of mathemat-
ical sophistication expected in Accounting does not reach the level
 K.H. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 249 (2016) 806–815
that can be found in OR; it has benefitted from the effort of Account-
ing, Organizations and Society editor Hopwood, who worked hard on
keeping connections between different research paradigms (Gendron
and Baker, 2005); it has been helped, luckily, by political decisions in
the UK in the 1980s that led to a large influx of academics with a
background in the social sciences and humanities into the field of Ac-
counting (Baker, 2011: 216); and it has been able to fill many open
positions in Accounting with researchers in Behavioural Accounting
as a large number of graduates in classic Accounting disciplines are
lured away from academia by the salaries paid in the industry. All
these circumstances have contributed to a boost for the development
of the discipline.
Behavioural OR is unlikely to be in such a comfortable position.
Its success and relevance will depend on the benevolence of the es-
tablished disciplines in OR. As we have seen in the examples given
in Section 3.1, so far it has primarily been researchers with an inter-
est in “soft OR” who have drawn on research paradigms in the so-
cial sciences to study behavioural aspects of OR interventions. For
Behavioural OR it is therefore crucial to develop close links with re-
search in core disciplines of OR with a strong mathematical focus. It
has to make additional efforts in effectively communicating its re-
search interests and in actively seeking collaboration beyond sub-
disciplines of OR that are per se comparably open to integrating be-
havioural aspects into their work; it has to follow the methodological
standards established in the social sciences to become visible also in
top journals of disciplines related to OR and in this way prove the re-
spectability of its academic work to colleagues within OR; and it has
to demonstrate its relevance particularly for the application of math-
ematical innovations in OR.
However, while Behavioural OR is not in the comfortable situation
of Behavioural Accounting, it can create for itself a fruitful environ-
ment within OR by seeking a broad outlook regarding the research
tasks it sets for itself (cf. Section 2), regarding the perspectives on be-
havioural phenomena it may take (Section 3.1), and regarding the in-
tellectual support it can find from closely related disciplines (Section
3.2). The diversity of examples and aspects provided in the previous
sections were an attempt at illustrating that Behavioural OR, when
being equipped with such a broad outlook, can achieve a degree of
openness that ensures that the newly emerging discipline does not
have to shy away from seeking contact with established core disci-
plines of OR, can be open to the problems of applying OR methods to
complex real-world decisions in these disciplines, and can optimisti-
cally demonstrate its relevance. In this way, and possibly only in this
way, will Behavioural OR be able to achieve the broad outlook within
OR, on OR itself that may lead to its success as a field of academic en-
quiry.
4. Conclusion: a possible definition of Behavioural OR
Behavioural OR is a newly emerging discipline of Operations Re-
search. This paper set out to provide a broad outlook on what this
discipline could be about. For this purpose it has made three sug-
gestions for research tasks that Behavioural OR may focus on and
addressed three pitfalls that it should aim at avoiding during the
next phase of its development. If we take all these insights seri-
ously and consider them as crucial, defining characteristics of the
new discipline of Behavioural OR, the aspects addressed in the pre-
vious sections of this paper motivate the following (somewhat ideal-
istic) definition of Behavioural OR, which may be seen as one pos-
sible way of unfolding the definition given by Hämäläinen et al.
(2013). It goes without saying that this definition is by no means
intended to be normative, but it may serve as a useful reminder
of the huge potential that lies in a broad understanding of Be-
havioural OR and inspire further discussion about the scope of the
discipline.
813
Behavioural OR is the sub-discipline of OR that
– in carrying forward the interdisciplinary tradition of OR,
– on the basis of the current level of theoretical, empirical and
methodological insights in the social sciences, understood as
a broad, multi-paradigmatic field,
– in close connection with recent problems and results of other
OR sub-disciplines, including those with a strongly quantita-
tive focus,
studies the way in which insights into human behaviour can be
integrated into OR techniques and the way in which the use of
OR techniques shapes and is shaped by human interactions,
in order to
(a) investigate, on a descriptive level, the consequences of the
use of OR techniques in the social context of organizations,
(b) provide, on the level of methodology, concepts that allow
for reflecting on the use of OR techniques in concrete practical
settings, and,
(c) stimulate, on a technological level, the development of
novel or improved OR techniques that enable organizations
to make better decisions;
thereby contributing to realizing OR’s raison d’être and aspi-
ration of being The Science of Better.
It has been demonstrated from various angles throughout this pa-
per that there are fascinating new research questions and insights
that are awaiting researchers in Behavioural OR, insights, which have
the potential to lead to a better understanding of what it means to
do OR, to enrich our approaches to modelling, problem solving and
decision support, and, ultimately, to better our efforts to solve com-
plex real-world decision problems. The success of the endeavour of
Behavioural OR will depend, to a significant extent, on whether the
Behavioural OR community itself will live, also across the inevitable
boundaries that constitute it as a sub-discipline, the open-minded,
broad outlook that hopefully will be shown towards Behavioural OR
by those who work in one of the traditional core disciplines of OR.
And it will depend on whether the Behavioural OR community will
be able to communicate to these colleagues that the insights of Be-
havioural OR do matter for their work and its practical relevance. –
This, at least, is the conviction out of which this paper has been writ-
ten.
Acknowledgements
The author is thankful to Florian Gebreiter, Attila Marton, Tobias
Scheytt, the two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this special
issue for useful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.
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