Emerging Trends and New Frontiers in Community Operational Research

Johnson, Michael P.; Midgley, Gerald; Chichirau, George

Abstract

Community operational research (COR), and its disciplinary relation, community-based operations research, have an increasingly high profile within multiple domains that benefit from empirical and analytic approaches to problem solving. Many of these areas are concentrated in human services, community and economic development, education and other non-profit services, and the nature of inquiry tends to be motivated by action research and systems thinking as much as traditional decision modeling. However, there are many other areas of inquiry in which COR has had only a modest presence to date. This paper identifies a number of these, distinguishing between ‘emerging trends’ (mostly in well-studied areas of operations research, management science and analytics) and ‘new frontiers’, which can be found in disciplinary traditions not commonly oriented towards empirical and analytic methods for problem solving, where community-engaged decision modeling represents new ways of generating knowledge, policies and prescriptions. This paper will show how the exploration of emerging trends and new frontiers in COR can provide a basis for the development of innovative research agendas that can broaden the scope and impact of the decision sciences.

Citation

Johnson, M. P., Midgley, G., & Chichirau, G. Emerging Trends and New Frontiers in Community Operational Research

• Working Paper Type: Working Paper
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 5, 2022
• Series Title: Centre for Systems Studies Research Memorandum. Hull University Business School
• Series Number: 101
• Keywords: Community operational research, community-based operations research; Analytics; Developing countries; Systems thinking
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4067349
• Additional Information: ISBN 978-1-906422-38-7