Richard O. Mason

• PhD
• Professor at Southern Methodist University

In 2014, MyTelco established an independent Business Analytics (MyBA) organization that provided data analytics services to both MyTelco and third party customers. It was expected that this organization would be able to fund itself through the revenues generated from the commercialization of insights derived from MyTelco’s data. To address the ethi...

Two of C. West Churchman’s former students, Richard O. Mason and Ian I. Mitroff reflect on West’s career, his contributions to management and to science, and on their experience studying with and subsequently working with him. August 29, 2013, marked the 100th anniversary of Churchman’s birth. Known as “C. West” professionally and simply “West” to...

Virtual communities and social networks assume and consume more aspects of people's lives. In these evolving social spaces, the boundaries between actual and virtual reality, between living individuals and their virtual bodies, and between private and public domains are becoming ever more blurred. As a result, users and their presentations of self,...

Expert systems offer promise for decision-making support in stressful circumstances such as those that occur when law enforcement officials respond to hostage-taking incidents. These are life-or-death situations in which the costs of decision error are enormous. This paper reports on an expert system being developed and tested to aid police decisio...

In cyberspace humankind is creating a new world. Telecommunications, computers, the Internet, and its vibrant offspring, E-commerce—all parts of the vaunted National Information Infrastructure, NII—are among the latest of a long line of information technologies that are changing the way people relate to one another, the ways they communicate, live,...

Numerous authors have attested to the incompleteness of most policy arguments. Until now, however, the machinery has not been available for dealing with complex and open-ended policy arguments. This paper synthesizes and extends recent developments in the logic of argumentation and symbolic logic to create a methodology for treating complex argumen...

Arguably, the most profound issue in designing and governing cyberspace focuses on intellectual property. Is cyberspace to be created as a common space - belonging to and used freely by the community as a whole - or is it to be partitioned into a multitude of proprietary closed boxes that are owned and sold, distributed, modified and used only acco...

Edited by Saul I. Gass and Carl M. Harris The Encyclopedia provides decision makers and problem solvers in business, government and academia with a comprehensive overview of the concepts and methodologies that combine to form the fields of operations research and management science (OR/MS). More than 228 separate entries show how OR/MS applies scie...

Historical research offers perspectives on phenomena that are unavailable by any other methodological means. They reflect the cultural circumstances and ideological assumptions that underlie phenomena and the role played by key decision makers together with long-term economic, social, and political forces in creating them. Each of these benefits is...

The Bank of America literally changed the banking industry during the 1950s by means of its ERMA and IBM 702 computer systems. These innovations in information technology resulted in a dominate design that helped keep the Bank of America in the lead for over a decade and a half. They were the collective work of a leader, Clark Beise, a maestro, Al...

MIS as a discipline has not yet developed a tradition of historical research. Historical analyses broaden our understanding of the processes by which information technology is introduced into organizations and of the forces that shape its use. Paramount among these processes are those Schumpeter called "creative destruction." These are events that...

Federal Express Corporation has used operations research (OR) to help make its major business decisions since its overnight package delivery operations began in 1973. An early failure pointed out the need for scientific analysis. Subsequently, a successful origin-destination model followed by models to simulate operations, finances, engine use, per...

Although there are many varieties of dialectics, they all have a common starting point: a contradiction. This commentary augments Nielsen's categorization by pointing out similarities among Socrates, Hegel, Marx, Argyris, and Schön, and Churchman's conceptions of dialectic as they evolve from this common source. In this context, Hegel's theory is r...

The articles in this special section express a common theme; the use of information technology in society is creating a rather unique set of ethical issues that requires the making of new moral choices on the part of society and has spawned special implications for its members. Technology itself is not the only, nor necessarily the most responsible...

This article describes the evolution of reservations processing at American Airlines, which became critical in the 1950s as passenger volumes threatened to overwhelm electromechanical and manual filing methods. American Airlines’ Advanced Process Research Department sought technical solutions for determining the availability of space on planes, adj...

Information-intensive services are being globally disaggregated as corporations respond to the pressures of increasing global competition, and take advantage of the opportunities made available by the progress of information technology and the emerging global work force. In order to globally disaggregate services, corporations must decide whether o...

Sumario: Why information and ethics? -- Information and responsibility: new ethical challenges -- Information and decision making -- Information systems and power -- Fundamentals of ethics -- Ethical thinking -- Ethical theories and principles -- Applications of information ethics in society -- Information professionalism -- Information ethics in o...

C. West Churchman has devoted most of his professional life to understanding the processes by which humankind secures improvement in social systems. This quest permeates his philosophy, teaching, and personal actions.

Executive Overview The problems America's organizations are facing are not due to temporary downturns in the economy. They are a vivid testimony to the tact that organizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are obsoiete. We need radically new kinds of organizations to meet the extreme challenges of today's world and tomorrow's. In the pa...

Discusses digital convergence, moral responsibilities, democratic principles, and the need to provide access to basic equipment that can be part of an information network; access to public information, including the ability to receive and transmit information necessary for effective citizen participation; and effective interfacing, i.e., usability,...

The alignment of worldwide computer-based information systems and integrated business strategies is critical to the success of multinational firms in a highly competitive global market. In this paper, information technology (I/T) solutions are explored that drive firms toward making economic decisions based on worldwide distributed knowledge. These...

During the Spring of 1988, the Harvard MIS History Project was established. Its primary mission is to develop a historical tradition in MIS research. To date, several exemplary IT-based business histories have been initiated. Studies of the Bank of America (including major changes in the banking industry) and of American Airlines are nearing comple...

The era of mass production and mass merchandising has given us an abundant cornucopia of products but has often done so at a considerable cost to customer service. Progress in information technology permits a return to an earlier era of hometown service, when customers were treated as individuals, products were often tailored to personal needs, and...

It is proposed that information professionals apply their special knowledge about information and information technology with one basic purpose in mind: to get the right information from the right source to the right client at the right time in the form most suitable for the use to which it is to be put and at a cost that is justified by its use. T...

The information age is bringing about a change in the world division of labor. Many of the great trading cities that arose during the Industrial Revolution as shipping, railroad, and financial centers are now facing new challenges, challenges brought about by global telecommunications. Information technology and the changing nature of business and...

This paper proposes that integrated services digital networks (ISDNs) can be used to educate groups of people by means of dialogue featuring an interactive exchange of textual, voice, graphic, and pictorial information. Participants need not meet in the same place at the same time. Instead, they may be remote and dispersed, and they can exchange in...

In his numerous writings C. West Churchman has shown how the systems approach can be used to secure improvements in the human condition. Specifically one must think holistically. Two concepts—exploration of opportunity costs and consideration for future generations—underline whole systems thinking. The author argues based on his own experience that...

Two primary attributes of knowledge producing activities are identified: tightness of control and richness of reality. These attributes are taken generally to be in opposition to one another at the same level of knowledge. Hence, ultimately researchers must make a trade-off between them. The more of one or both of these attributes a knowledge-produ...

In this volume, we will explore a key factor that can contribute to career success—an individual's decision style. To be successful, an executive must know his or her style to be able to focus on achieving objectives in a frequently changing environment. In this volume we meet the needs of executives who are concerned with being more effective as...

Recent changes in the health care industry that foster competition are drastically affecting hospital planning and marketing activities. Increased price competition, the development of less costly alternative health care delivery systems and providers, and the shift to prospective average-cost reimbursement for Medicare beneficiaries are major fact...

Human resource information systems (HRIS) have become a major MIS subfunction within the personnel areas of many large corporations. This article traces the development of HRIS as an entity independent of centralized MIS, assesses its current operation ...

The worldwide use of computers, telecommunications, and other information technologies is giving rise to the formation of new communities called “information communities.” In the United States, for example, more people are employed as information givers, takers, or orchestrators in these communities than in any other occupation class. With so many...

A discussion of the 1980 U.S. census is presented. The authors suggest that the taking of a national census is not just a statistical exercise, but an exercise involving ethics, epistemology, law, and politics. They contend that conducting a national census can be defined as an ill-structured problem in which the various complexities imposed by mul...

This paper argues that the increasing complexity of manegerial problems calls for radically new kinds of information systems. These systems must not only be more sophisticated in the underlying psychology they presume, but in their logic as well. In short, we argue that such systems must be dialectical in order (1) to handle the wide variety of inp...

It is only within the last ten years that the necessary technical machinery has been developed that enables us to construct models that even begin to approach the complexity of dialectical reasoning. This paper shows both the diversity and the complexity of the concepts that must be woven together in order to construct a dialectic process logic, i....

This paper extends the work of Toulmin on argumentation and Rescher on modal logic by combining them into a single framework. The result is a powerful tool for analyzing the structure and dynamics of arguments. In particular, it allows us to construct a novel model of dialectical reasoning. The model is capable of handling both qualitative and quan...

This paper presents a new framework for handling ill-structured decision problems. The framework derives from recent developments in the logic of argumentation. It shows how policy statements may under certain conditions be construed as the outcome of a complex process of argumentation. The framework is especially suited to ill-structured decision...

Seven aspects of measurement are of particular importance in terms of MIS foundations: (1) scientific and technical characteristics, (2) basic design choices, (3) level of information and decision support, (4) managerial functions supported, (5) organizational focus, (6) information system component origin, and (7) behavioral dimensions. A brief su...

Business policy is described as an exercise in applied metaphysics. Policy making requires the manager to go beyond knowledge derived purely from direct experience, to deal with questions concerning the nature and structure of reality, and to create methods for acquiring knowledge about the world in which his enterprise operates. Twelve approaches...

Cosier raises a number of valid points in his critique of research on dialectical inquiry, but we believe he has misrepresented the nature of dialectic. As a result, his experiments do not touch the essential phenomenon that dialectical inquiry is attempting to get at.

There can be little doubt that what we have come to call scientific method has undergone significant transformation and development in this century and the last. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the social sciences. If the essence of method be identified with control, quantification, and measurement, then the ability of the social scienc...

The sociology of science owes a tremendous debt to Robert Merton for his many substantive contributions and for his continual suggestion of important, unsolved problems. This chapter addresses one of these problems. It attempts to show how the dialectic extends to the underlying normative structure of science. That is, the dialectic extends to the...

Man lives by his imagination. This is as true of the modern organization as it is for an individual. The particular set of beliefs or assumptions about the world that an organization adopts, guides its activity and dictates its success or failure. This is especially true of an organization’s strategic plan.

Many biographics and autobiographics attest to the power that stories play within modern large-scale organizations. These autobiographics retell in a form strikingly similar to the great epic myths of the past (Murray, 1960), the life of the organization and that of the individual within it. They describe in heroic terms more dramatic than life its...

The basic purpose of this chapter is to introduce the first of our series of formal model regarding the dialectic. Since the model bears directly on our discussion on the first chapter, it is important to appreciate that the problem discussed there is a perfectly general one. The general problem is: “Given that there always exist a number of comput...

The previous chapter formulated the dialectic in terms of Ackoff’s ‘Behavioral theory of Communication’ (1958). The primary purpose of this chapter is to develop a Brunswik (1955) Lens Model foumulation (Hursch et al., 1964). The Ackoff formulation is most appropriate for those situations in which we want to calculate the information behavior (e.g....

In recent years, scientific controversies have, with growing regularity, attracted public scrutiny and debate. The controversy over the nature and functioning of the peer review system is an outstanding case in point. That this controversy strikes to the heart of science’s most sacred and cherished values — institutional and political autonomy vis-...

Both the environment in which they operate and the kinds of problems they face typically place the manager or decision-maker in a real dilemma or paradox; the manager constantly faces problems for which there is a real need for the best available evidence to define the nature of the problem, let alone how best to solve it. At the same time, the man...

Consider the plight of the contemporary manager: the forces affecting corporate planning today stem from a wide variety of external sources—public interest groups, changing customer demands, foreign nations, government agencies, and many more. Consequently, the problems that managers and planners must solve are increasingly complex. They are, in ad...

This paper extends previous work in the development of a methodology for ill-structured policy problems. It argues that recent advances in the structure and logic of argumentation allow one to develop a new basis for treating policy issues. In brief, policies may be viewed as the outcome of a process of reasoning (argumentation) whose purpose is to...

Organizations, in our view, are epistemological systems, bodies of knowledge which are the accumulation of past debates with regard to goals, purposes, and beliefs. Policies, plans and strategies are current dialogues intended to change that corpus of knowledge. Consequently, a theory of argumentation is a requisite paradign for studying organizati...

Who are we? What are we to become? The construction of reality involves the utmost in uncertainty. At the bottom of the web of strategic uncertainty sits the assumption. "Majestic Metals," a large primary metals company, provides a case history in this study of what executives may do with the assumption.

The process of measurement is examined from the viewpoint of management in this article. The manager is seen to have three dispositions toward the use of measurement: for the direction of his or her attention; for problem solving; and for scorecard keeping. In regarding organizations as purposeful systems, three levels of measurement for management...

Productivity is treated as a systems concept. It is argued that the causal texture of the system's environment dictates the relevant productivity construct and measurement. Based on Emery and Trist's taxonomy of environments, three concepts of productivity are defined: Process productivity, bounded productivity and systemic productivity. Each conce...

We live in an “information age,” an era in which the production and dissemination of information has become more important than the production and distribution of goods and services. Information activities have become a substantial part of the United States Gross National product. Nearly one-half of the U.S. workforce is currently employed in infor...

There is an old saying, “War is too important to be left to the Generals.” To this I would add, “World models are too important to be left to the model builders.” This does not mean that the burden of the model building effort should not be borne by operations researchers and modeling experts. However, as the ultimate stakes are so terribly high, I...

This paper describes some key defining characteristics of a special class of information systems known as Management Myth-Information Systems (MMIS) or story-telling information systems. MMIS are information systems [Mason, Richard O., Ian I. Mitroff. 1973. A program for research on management information systems. Management Sci. 19 (5, January) 47...

This paper describes the difficulties in evaluating large-scale scientific programs. These difficulties are illustrated through a single case study of the Apollo moon program. The paper describes some of the results of a three and a half year investigation into the beliefs of 42 of the most eminent scientists who studied the moon rocks. The effect...

A primary cause for the failure of both formal and informal management information systems to live up to expectations stems from the designer's lack of awareness or improper conception of the interfaces existing between information and man, its user. This underscores the need for a better understanding of the relationship between man, psychological...

An information system consists of, at least, a PERSON of a certain PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPE who faces a PROBLEM within some ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT for which he needs EVIDENCE to arrive at a solution, where the evidence is made available through some MODE OF PRESENTATION. This defines the key variables comprising a Management Information System (MIS). It...

Through the use of Bayesian probability theory and Communication theory, a formal mathematical model of a Churchmanian Dialectical Inquirer is developed. The Dialectical Inquirer is based on Professor C. West Churchman's novel interpretation and application of Hegelian dialectics to decision theory. The result is not only the empirical application...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, 1968. Includes bibliography. Photocopy.

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This paper develops a new approach to the planning process. It begins by examining the critical role played by the planner's assumptions. Two criteria for a good planning technique are suggested by this examination: (1) It should expose the assumptions underlying a proposed plan so that management can reconsider them and (2) it should suggest new a...