Abstract
Operational researchers in the United States have been working with community groups since the late 1960s (Ackoff, 1970), and in the UK since the mid-1970s (Noad and King, 1977; Trist and Burgess, 1978)—some ten years before the term ‘community OR’ was first coined. However, the labelling of community OR as a specific sub-discipline of operational research facilitated a significant expansion of this kind of activity. In 1986, funding from the Operational Research Society was secured to base a Community OR Unit at Northern College in the UK, and this opened in 1988. In 1987, the Community OR Network (a study group of the Operational Research Society) was formed (with over 300 members), and the Centre for Community OR was opened at the University of Hull (later to be merged into the Centre for Systems Studies, resulting in a massive expansion of community OR activity at Hull). Since 1987, there have been community OR streams at many national and international conferences, and two conferences have been dedicated solely to community OR. More detailed histories of the institutional development of the community OR movement can be found elsewhere (Parry and Mingers, 1991; Ritchie, 1994).
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Midgley, G., Ochoa-Arias, A.E. (2004). Visions of Community for Community OR. In: Midgley, G., Ochoa-Arias, A. (eds) Community Operational Research. Contemporary Systems Thinking. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8911-6_4
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