MANAGEMENT SCIENCE Vol. 50, No. 1, January 2004, pp. 1–7 issn 0025-1909  eissn 1526-5501  04  5001  0001 inf orms ® doi 10.1287/mnsc.1030.0181 ©2004 INFORMS 50th Anniversary Article Fifty Years of Management Science Wallace J. Hopp Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, hopp@northwestern.edu T his issue marks the start of the 50th volume of Management Science. As is customary on such “round number” occasions, we will be taking time for a bit of retrospective review and soul-searching speculation. We begin here with an overall assessment of the journal’s performance relative to its original mission. In subsequent articles, which will appear in issues throughout Volume 50, we will take more detailed disciplinary looks at the past, present, and future of Management Science and the management subfields it represents. Key words : management science; history; TIMS; anniversary 1. An Optimistic Beginning On the evening of December 1, 1953, a group of 57 individuals met at the instigation of Melvin Salve- son at Columbia University and voted The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) into existence. The story of that meeting and the events that led up to it have been related elsewhere (e.g., Cooper 2002, Horner 1993, Salveson 1997, TIMS 1954), so I will not repeat them here. Instead, I will focus on the impact of a single sentence in the Constitution and By-Laws adopted at that meeting: To provide a medium for disseminating knowledge of the management sciences, to stimulate research in these sciences, and to encourage and improve applica- tions of this knowledge the Institute shall undertake to publish a Journal, to be called Management Science. Recognizing the serious challenge posed by these words, the newly elected Council, headed by William Cooper, made the task of selecting an editorial board its first order of business. With the help of Abe Charnes, Cooper quickly recruited C. West Church- man, then of Case Institute of Technology and editor- in-chief of Philosophy of Science, to be the first editor of Management Science. The rest of the editorial board was appointed before the end of the first quarter of 1954, and the inaugural issue was published in time for the first National Meeting of TIMS in October of that same year. 1 1 This remarkable pace was accomplished because: (a) Salveson had begun collecting manuscripts the previous year and (b) Charnes, Cooper, and Churchman bypassed the normal refereeing process and reviewed the manuscripts themselves. Management Science was born in the midst of a burst of enthusiasm for quantitative methods. Moti- vated by the well-publicized successes of operations research during World War II, a British group formed the Operational Research Club (which later became the Operational Research Society) in 1948 and began publishing the Operational Research Quarterly (later the Journal of the Operational Research Society) in 1950. In the United States, a group similar to (indeed overlap- ping with) the TIMS founders formed the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and began pub- lishing its journal, Operations Research, in 1952. The connections between TIMS and ORSA that would lead to their merger 40 years later were evi- dent from the beginning. Both founding groups were firm believers in mathematical methods and point- edly emphasized “science” in their respective con- stitutions. While ORSA had stronger military roots, many TIMS founders had also used OR methods dur- ing the war. Furthermore, although TIMS immedi- ately keyed on the word “management” in contrast to ORSA’s emphasis of the word “operations,” Oper- ations Research was also concerned with management issues, as evidenced by that journal’s introduction of a section called “Management’s Corner” in 1956. Some have suggested that the real reason the TIMS founders wanted a separate society was to allow open membership in contrast with ORSA’s hierar- chical membership grades (Miser 1993). 2 Given that some members perceived the distinction between the 2 The TIMS Constitution explicitly specified that the only qualifica- tions for membership were an interest in the management sciences and payment of dues, which were set at $10 per year in contrast to $15 for ORSA. 1