Organization and Mathematics: A Look into the Prehistory of Industrial Engineering

Ana Millán Gasca

Chapter 2 in Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Modern Engineering Systems, 2004, pp 21-51 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract One intellectual process that has strongly marked the history of the 20 th century is bound up with the specific attention paid to the problems of control, management and organization and the attempt to measure oneself with them on the basis of a rational, explicit representation. This representation had to be suitable for making generalizations, possibly through mathematical modeling, and to replace the traditional approach to such questions based on implicit and intuitive knowledge used to resolve them on a case by case basis. In the 20th century problems arose which acted as an urgent stimulus to these developments: first the diffusion of mass production; then the large-scale logistics problems that arose during World War II, which represented a turning point; the management of international equilibria during the Cold War period and, again during the central decades of the century, the development of the great public and private organizations and the strengthening of the need for a government of society and the economy based on science and the advice of experts; lastly, the current problem of controlling and managing the globalization of communications, production, and commerce.

Keywords: Operation Research; Mathematical Tool; Industrial Engineer; Industrial Engineering; Management Aspect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-0348-7951-4_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783034879514

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-0348-7951-4_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().