MANAGEMENT SCIENCE - SCIENCE OF MANAGING AND MANAGING OF SCIENCE

As the first editor-in-chief of Management Science, I expressed my amb ition for the society (TIMS) and its journal. My notion was that a soc iety and journal in the subject of a science of management would inves tigate how humans can manage their affairs well. For me, ''well'' mean s ''ethically,'' or in the best interest of humanity in a world of fil thy oppression and murder (I'm a philosopher and therefore have a phil osophical bias, the same bias Plato had when he wrote the Republic). I find that 40 years later management scientists have been inventing al l kinds of mathematical models and novelties (management by objectives , game theory, artificial intelligence, expert systems, TQM, chaos the ory), and none of these has contributed much to the ethical benefit of human beings. Hence, in 1993, we are still waiting for a science of m anagement to emerge, although there are some lights at the end of the tunnel.