Model legitimisation in operational research

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH ELSEVIER

European Joumalof Operational Research 92 (1996) 443-457

Model legitimisation in operational research M . L a n d r y *, C. B a n v i l l e , M . O r a l Facultd des sciences de l' administration, Universit~ Laval, Quebec (Qc), Canada, G1K 7P4

Abstract

This paper suggests that model validation and model legitimisation are two overlapping hut nevertheless distinct activities, and that it takes more than being valid for an OR model to be organizationally acceptable: it has to be legitimate. The paper forwards the idea that the implementation of a model is necessarily part of a change process and hence has impact on the organization. It discusses how organizational contract and legitimacy are related to one another, and how, in a change process, a model can be used in different modes by different stakeholders. Concrete suggestions for model legitimisation are proposed. The paper concludes by linking model legitimisation and model validation.

1. Introduction

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a child was born. This child was amazingly gifted. Soon after his birth, he was able to tackle difficult problems never solved before. Furthermore, these problems were not just toys, fabricated, crypt arithmetic, or puzzle types of problems but weighty problems touching upon the concrete lives of people. B e c a u s e of that, people were constantly calling upon him for help. He was very much in demand and respected. His favorite strategy for problem solving was to build a model of the situation under scrutiny and use it in determining what should be done to solve the problem. Part of his secret seemed to have been that he was carefully validating his models before putting them into use. The tremendous talent of the newborn did not really come as a surprise since his father was then very famous and reigning on the kingdom of knowledge. The father's name was Science, his ruling code was logical positivism, and the newborn child, his son, * Corresponding author.

was "'Operational R e s e a r c h " , later nicknamed "'OR". Since then, things have considerably changed. The kingdom of knowledge has been shaken by several epistemological revolutions (D6ry, Landry and Banville, 1993), beliefs in science have changed, and the views on the successes and failures of OR have proliferated. Some have claimed "the future of operational research is past" (Ackoff, 1979) while others were in the opinion that " O R is alive and well" (Gass, 1991). For the majority nevertheless, the view was that the future of OR had to be taken care of, and the more we would be ready to make a realistic assessment of the past and be willing to act accordingly in the future, the brighter this future. We share this view. In this paper we would like to participate in this future oriented assessment of the past by concentrating on one particularly worrisome situation to many in the OR field: the value and use of OR models in organizations or, in others words, their legitimacy. It is often believed that an impressive number of OR models are proposed in the academic and profes-

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sional OR literature, yet only few of them are put into use in real life settings and have significant impact on organizations: " W h y are so many models built and so few used?" (Lilien, 1975). On the other hand, some have asked if the OR literature is really representative of what is being done under OR or similar rifles in industry. For example, Michel and Permut (1978), Raiszadeh and Lingaraj (1986), and Zahedi (1984) reported the publication of a low percentage of real-world OR applications in the leading OR literature, implying that the journals are not really representative of OR practice. What is remarkable about this particular controversy is that, whatsoever is one's position on it, the conditions for a model to be acceptable and used remain a central issue. If OR models are adequately validated should they not be scientifically correct, and hence organizationally acceptable? Perhaps the ways that OR models are validated should be questioned. Or, perhaps it takes more than being valid for an OR model to be organizationaUy acceptable. If so, what is it? These are some of the questions addressed in this paper. The central thesis of this paper is that OR models need to be legitimate in order to be organizationally acceptable. Any model that is not legitimate in the eyes of those for whom it is intended or constructed will not have much chance for acceptance and use in an organization. The less a model is legitimate, the less it is likely to be successfully implemented. Furthermore, it will be argued that a valid model is not necessarily a legitimate one. Therefore, the legitimacy of a model becomes essential and crucial for it to be used in an organization and one ought to be more sensitive and attentive to the issues of model legitimisation. On the other hand, it is possible that a valid model may be illegitimate, but one should strive for a model that is both valid and legitimate at the same time. Since legitimacy is by far the less familiar of the two concepts in the OR literature, the first part of the paper will be concerned with it. This part (Section 2) will be divided into two sub-sections. Section 2.1, coping with the elusive but ever present legitimacy dimension of social activities, will serve as a general introduction to the concept of legitimacy. Section 2.2, exploring the relation between organizational change process, legitimacy, model building and model use, will successively look at the role of

model building and model use in organizational change process, some attributes of models and how they relate to change process, and, finally, model legitimisation. In the second part of the paper (Section 3), we will essentially concentrate on the link between model validation and model legirimisation. Since the concept of model validation is so central in OR, we will assume that the OR specialist is knowledgeable about it and that a detailed discussion is not in order here. (However, the reader who is more interested in recent trends and thoughts in model validation is referred to the Special Issue of the European Journal of Operational Research (Landry and Oral, 1993) on the subject.) So, it will not be dissected in this paper. Instead, we intend to take advantage of this knowledge to relate the concept of model validation to what will have been said about model legitimisation in Section 2.

2. Organizational legitimacy and operational research models Legitimacy is a rich and powerful concept. It is quite abstract and multi-faceted. Thoughts on it can be found dispersed in the literature of fields of inquiry as diverse as political science, semiotics, sociology, ethics, business administration, anthropology, and philosophy (Banville, 1990). The concept of legitimacy is thus in need of operationalization in the particular context within which it is put into use. Our objective in this part is to explore it to the point of reaching an operational understanding of what is meant by legitimacy, and of being in a position to derive the consequences of having or not having at hand a legitimate model.

2.1. The elusive but ever present legitimacy dimension of social activities There is a broad spectrum of issues within which one finds legitimacy discussed (see Banville (1990) for a rather extensive treatment of this topic). Conditions of successful adaptation of a social system to its environment, requisite for domination or authority to be acceptable and for obedience to be expected, consequences of conformity or nonconformity of some actions to social values or norms, requirements

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for a satisfactory change to take place and, ultimately, the right of an organization to exist are examples of such issues (see, e.g., Merelman, 1966; Stillman, 1974; Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; Freedman, 1978; Richardson and Dowling, 1986). As can be seen, apart from being highly relevant, all these issues refer to a fundamental questioning on conditions for survival, maintenance, adaptation or change of entities or systems. Legitimacy is important because it is seen as a necessary condition for those maintenance, adaptation or change activities to succeed. For example, force can be used to implement a social change. But then, force will have to be maintained, often at a high cost, unless power is transformed into right, and obedience into duty, thus rendering t h e change legitimate (as was so well expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1977) in Le contrat social). Thus, legitimacy is a highly desirable attribute of human activities that provides an efficient way to maintain, adapt or change an entity or a system. If, as suggested, legitimacy is highly advantageous, then it becomes appropriate to: ask how it is achieved. Broadly speaking, the process of legitimisation encompasses two complementary and often unconscious activities. The first one is a comparison of concrete actions, situations, or states o f affairs with a set of abstract entities comprising values, norms or symbolic reference systems, which will be referred to as the " c o d e " henceforth. The second activity is a judgment as to the conformity of these concrete actions, situations, or states of affairs with the corresponding :code, But, what are we referring to when talking about that code, :and who could b e said to be the judge in this matter? The answers t o :thesequestions are contingent upon time and space. Richardson and Dowling (1986) have summarized them under t w o views: t h e traditional and the contemporary. In the traditi0nal view, the code is assumed to be given and unvarying. It refers to blessed or pious tex~ or other highly respected documents from which moral a n d ethical principles that should rule human actions are distilled. Because of the special status of these texts, their interpretation remains as a proper domain of a special class of people that act as the great priests in this matter. As can be seen, this suggests a quite elitist and stable view of legitimacy. Max Weber

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(1968), a central authority on legitimacy, can be related to this traditional perspective, according to Richardson and Dowling (1986). Let us recall that Weber distinguishes three types of legitimate dominations. The first one, called rational-legal, rests on rational grounds based " o n the belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands..." (p. 215). The second is based on the belief in the sanctity of tradition and the appropriateness of ruling according to it. The third stems from charisma, the "gift of grace", and rests on devotion to "exceptional" men and women and in the belief in the normative character of the way they behave or of their orders. In the Weberian view, legitimacy within an organization is above all a question of identifying the place one occupies within a pre-established symbolic system based on authority, tradition or charisma (with charisma being the less frequent and the less stable form of legitimate domination in organizational contexts according to Kets de Vries (1987)) The code is thus given and quite stable. The contemporary view of legitimacy, on the other hand, challenges the belief that the code is exogenous; it is seen as socially constructed. Implicit in this socially constructed perspective is the view that the social actors are the proper interpreters o f the code. Thus, the elitist view of legitimacy is also disputed and the great priests lose their privileged status. They become interpreters amongst interpreters. Furthermore, if the code is socially constructed, it can also evolve according to changes in the values and norms of the social actors: it is no more assumed to be stable and ever lasting. As can be seen, this is a quite different view of legitimacy. The code used to judge is much less stable across time and across organizational actors, and the number of judges, guardians of the code, is tremendously increased. This leads to a more democratic but, at the same time, much less comfortable view of legitimacy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau can be seen as an early proponent of this more contemporary view. For him, all men are born free and none of them has a "natural" right upon others. Power cannot produce tightness to rule. Only agreed upon conventions are acceptable as legitimate bases of power. Thus, for Rousseau, the code is the product of a social conven-

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tion, the social contract. How is that convention established or changed then becomes the key to understanding legitimacy. A quite contemporary answer to this question can be summarized using the well-known explanation of Berger and Luckmann (1967). Repeated interactions among social actors create routinized pattems of interaction or typifications. When the typifications become internalized ("objectivated") by the concerned social actors, they rum into institutions. Institutions, then, are accepted conventions of behavior. The more the social actors behave in the way anticipated by a convention, the more they reinforce it and make it acquire a normative status. The less the routinized convention is in use, the more it becomes obsolete: this is the way of purging the code. When an actor does not act according to the code, his actions can be sanctioned as illegitimate and he may be subjected to reprobation. But the larger the number of social actors acting in ways that are incompatible with the convention, the more the convention is itself challenged, and instability created. A new convention then has to be instituted for stability to be restored, or chaos will prevail: this is the way of changing the code. The question of specifying the code that rules a given community at a given time is a very tough one. For one thing, the code is not only based on discursive knowledge, that is, knowledge that can be the object of a discourse, but on practical knowledge as well, the type of knowledge that cannot be specified, at a given time, through discourse but that is used in daily life (Giddens, 1984). A second reason is that the specification of the code, if at all possible, could rapidly make it obsolete as members of the community would then become extremely vulnerable to manipulation. This is not to say that nothing can be said about the nature and content of the code, but it is to say that a discourse on the code cannot be very specific. Nevertheless, as far as models in OR are concerned, it is one of the objectives of this paper to derive some consequences of abiding by that code and the reader will find some elements of our view on this matter below. So, in the contemporary view of legitimacy adopted here, the process of building a common code and judging the conformity of actions to it is a matter for all social actors since, through the way they interact, they all participate in its making and in

its change. The code is used to judge and sanction the activities of the social actors. No social actor can escape the elusive but ever present legitimacy dimension of his actions or activities unless he is ready to resort to force.., but for how long, and at what price? Let us raise a final, and important, question regarding legitimacy. From a "traditional" OR point of view, why should one bother with a concept that is so ambiguous, so far from "operational", that escapes all our formalization attempts? As has already been argued above, legitimacy surely facilitates the action of change agents such as OR specialists, and that is the main argument: a legitimate change should be easily implemented and inserted into the social fabrics of the involved instance. If specifications of legitimate action are hard to come by, it may be helpful to ponder what legitimisation is not. One may thereby discover new guidelines for action. First, legitimisation cannot b e mystification (Richardson, 1985). Such mystification may be apparent in Merelman's statement that "the learning process by which lower animals are trained to make responses to stimuli may be taken as a paradigm for the development of political legitimacy" (Merelman, 1966, p. 549). In our view, legitimating change is far from training Pavlov's dogs. Second, one should be mindful of the possible "hollow rhetoric" (Arthurs, 1987) of legitimacy. Appealing to a few powerful legitimating symbols certainly does not fool all the people, all the time. Thirdly, and maybe mostly, any change agent should not confuse manipulation and legitimisation. As was stated by Leslie (1975), "The 'right to govern' [or the 'right to change things'] is what legitimacy means. It is not, in an open society, an inherited right, but a labouriously earned one. It cannot be sustained for long with quick cures, public relations maneuvers, or image polishing. Rather, the careful tending of fences and use o f the right material in fixing the holes are the fundamentals in the business of sustaining a political order (academic or civil)". (p. 245).

2.2. Linking organizational change and model legitimisation The process of organizational change and that of model legitimisation will be linked to one another

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through (1) the role of models in the context of organizational change, (2) the attributes of models and their relation to organizational change, and (3) the process of model legitimisation within the context of organizational change. 2.2.1. The role o f models in organizational change processes

An organization can be seen as "intricate web of contractual relations between various stakeholders" (Dobson, 1990). Contractual relations are necessary for organizations to avoid chaotic behavior and to allow for collective action. These contractual arrangements that regulate the relations between stakeholders are more or less explicit, more or less legal. They are as diverse as union contracts, formal authority relations, explicit description of roles, official roles of procedures, and tradition as to the order of priority in the choice of dates for vacations, or as to the way to dress at work: All these arrangements are the result of explicit or implicit negotiations and subject to interpretation by t h e different parties involved: they form the content o f what we will call the "organizational contract", binding together the different stakeholders. The arrangements are the result of explicit or implicit negotiations because, as already stressed, collective action generally comes about through some form of negotiation. Interpretations of the organizational contract are also unavoidable because it is in the very nature of contracts to leave room for interpretation. Finally, the organizational contract binds the different stakeholders because it has been negotiated by them within the framework of the social code in which the organization operates. Of course, these stakeholders do not have an equal weight in negotiationS. The extent to which a stakeholder controls crucial uncertainties for the organization is, for example, a good indicator of his weight. On the other hand, no stakeholder is completely weightless. Within this view of organization, the model building activity, together with the corresponding intervention actions derived from it, can be seen as part of a genuine change process. Indeed, for managers, models are instruments used by OR specialists to help them conceptualize, formalize and solve problems which they face, and on which they want to intervene. These interventions will change things.

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The change process will most likely affect other actors that may or may not be in agreement with those changes. As a result, several different categories of actors have a stake in the activities surrounding the development and use of a model in an organization. First, there is of course the OR specialist that is usually in charge of building and' 'driving" (as a chauffeur) the model. Second, one finds the "manager", as an individual or a team, a "problem management team", as it has been called elsewhere (Banville et al., 1993), who claims to have a problem. He is the initiator of the change, the one that has requested the help of the OR specialist, and will most likely work with him. Finally, there are what we will call the "third parties", those other than the manager and the OR specialists within the organization that can affect o r be affected by the way the problem is solved, They may have very diversified and divergent interests in the problem solution: In the words :of de Neufville and Keeney, 1972, they are "representatives of different points of view". These three categories of actors can roughly be seen as the main stakeholders o f the model being built and used. They all have an interest in it and will, in one way or another, bear a judgment as to the legitimacy of the change process, and, consequently, on the model as an instrument for conceptualizing and implementing that change. Through the change process and the use of the model, a new order is sought and thus, at least, some new arrangements will have to be negotiated to legitimize the new order. The basic materials for this negotiation are the organizational contract currently binding together different stakeholders, their interpretations of it, their judgment as to the congruence o f the foreseen change with the social code on which the organizational contract is based, and, finally, the resources they control: Indeed, to conceptualize and implement the change'process, resources are required and control over the required resources for conceiving and implementing the change process is a source of power :for those who control them (Crozier and Friedberg, 1980). These resources, e.g. knowledge resources, are not under the exclusive control of the manager. On the other hand, the exercise of this power by the different stakeholders is limited by the rules contained in the organizational contract. However, the organizational contract never completely

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curbs the margin of freedom of the different stakeholders, because a change process, by its very nature, is a change to the organizational contract. In this change process, some are more equal than others simply because some control more resources, e.g., the managements of large organizations for which " O R has worked almost exclusively" (Rosenhead, 1989), or are in better positions. Thus, the margin of freedom of the different stakeholders is likely to be used when bearing a legitimacy judgment on the proposed change. Fig. 1 recapitulates the main ideas of this section in the form of a cognitive map (Eden, 1988). In the figure, an arrow means "leads to" (in some way), a line means a link in both directions and " . . . " means "rather than". For example, the "Organizational contract" ( # 8 ) leads to "Collective action rather than Chaotic behavior" (#9) which leads to " B i n d s " (#10) while " B i n d s " are defined and regulated through an "Organizational contract" that they simultaneously contribute to define. An interesting aspect of this map is the loop between "Organizational contract" (#8), "Interpretation" ( # 1 3 ) and

"Negotiations rather than Force" (#7). It expresses the idea that interpretations of the organizational contract are made or used during the negotiations, but, also, that these negotiations transform, to a certain degree, the organizational contract which may then be interpreted in new ways, and so on. It is with this general view of organization in mind that, in the next section, we look more closely at some attributes of models and what role these attributes play in the change process and its legitimisation; in a sense, this section details some of the paths between concepts # 3 and # 1 2 in Fig. 1. 2.2.2. Some attributes o f models and their relation to organizational change

While investigating the characteristics of quantitative decision aids, Boulaire (1992) has pointed out that all of these tools are enabling, as well as constraining, thought and action (in the same way, Orlikowski (1992), using Giddens (1984), has investigated how new technologies are both enabling and constraining devices). This general remark, together with Boulaire's (1992) other findings from the study

10 Binds

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12 Legitimacy...

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9...Collective action Chaoticbehavior

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4 Thirdpartiesaffect

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~legitimacy

8 Organizational ~

5 Controlofresources

asastake

3 Changeprocess throughmodelling

--....

I Managerwants anorganizational change

J~- 2 Oil spedalk~ build models

Fig.1.ORmodelsand organizationallegitimacy.

13 Interpretation

11 Socialcode

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of decision aid, can be applied to the case of OR models. The enabling side of models directly leads to their instrumental mode of use as tools for understanding, thinking and suggesting action, and it generally is their flexibility that makes them more "enabling than restrictive" (Rosenhead, 1989). It is this view that OR specialists have most of the time in mind when talking about models. For example, Oral and Kettani (1993) have recently synthesized the OR problems in four contextual groups, each corresponding to a facet of the modeling-validation tetrahedron formed by the quartet of managerial situation-conceptual model-formal model-decision. These contextually classified problems are associated with four types of models: (1) prototype models, where the often recurrent situations being modeled correspond to well structured managerial problems, and the objective is that of developing expertise in order to respond quickly in similar situations; (2) descriptive models, where the emphasis is on conceptualizing and formalizing unstructured situations and the context surrounding them in order to explore and understand the dynamics of systems or managerial problems of concern; (3) pragmatic models that are needed to provide quick but satisfactory solutions when the managerial situation at hand is either a pressing issue (leaving very little time to develop a formal model) or a complex system or process for which a formal model is too difficult or expensive to construct, and (4) theoretical models that are associated with those problems where the managerial situation is considered to be understood and well structured in the form of a conceptual model and the emphasis is mostly on theoretical and computational aspects. These four types of models are clear cases where it is the enabling or instrumental side of models that is stressed. Note that this enabling side of models is most likely to be the one on :the mind of a manager when he calls an OR specialist for assistance. Models are also constraining devices. As suggested by Poggi (1965), and many others after him (Benson, 1977; Pondy and Mitroff, 1979; Astley and Van de Ven, 1983; Weick, 1984), any modeling method is not only a way of seeing but also a way of not seeing. Indeed, each model bears with it a set of simplifying assumptions and hypotheses about the phenomenon under investigation. It imposes a perspective that limits the way of looking at the phe-

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nomenon, and consequently of acting on it while other assumptions, hypotheses and perspectives could have been advocated and used with different results. Although models are useful in establishing a more transparent process of decision making through their formal and explicit procedures (Boulaire, 1992), they are not completely free from being uncertain and equivocal constructs. First, actors interacting with a model may not be perfectly aware of the assumptions made and hypotheses forwarded in constructing the model. As a result of this, they can never be sure about the implications of its use. Moreover, in the presence of several actors with a diversity of interests, a model can be interpreted and valued differently. Furthermore, the more sophisticated a model is, e.g., mathematically, the less it is likely to be used directly in organizations: it is language that is the common currency of organizational life (Eden, 1989) and organizational problem solving (Eden, 1986). Being dependent on OR specialists makes those actors partially lose their autonomy. Therefore, model use creates dependency and uncertainty: models are threatening and risky to use. This is not a very comfortable situation to be in for someone involved in shaping a change process and negotiating a new order. Because of this constraining side of models, it is quite natural that the actors interacting with it will tend to " p l a y it safe". How will this be achieved? According to March (1978), actors have an interest in maintaining a certain level o f ambiguity (see also March and Olsen, 1985; Meyer, 1984; Landry, 1995) when confronted with models in their instrumental mode, in such a way that dices will never be completely cast for them. Indeed, actors know that they will have to "engage in post decisional justification [...] in order to restore cognitive consistency [...] and reestablish feelings of rationality, potency, and morality" (Meyer, 1984). They also know pretty well that the model's outputs will not please all of them equally welt and that they will often have to come up with some kind of compromise for which room must be provided. As pointed out by Rosenhead (1989), there has to be some "accommodation between participants". In the context of a change process supported by a model, the different stakeholders in this process are engaged in some kind of bargaining activity, and each of them knows that he

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will have to "live with" the agreed upon change and adjust accordingly with other stakeholders. Ambiguity is required to provide room for that. One way or another, models are never used in a strict instrumental mode where exploring, understanding, prototyping or theorizing about a phenomenon (Oral and Kettani, 1993) are stressed. Models are also used in both an "underground" and "symbolic" modes. The underground mode results from the personal self-centered interest each stakeholder has in being ambiguous in order to keep room for restoring personal feelings of cognitive consistency, rationality, potency, and morality. This mode is said to be underground precisely because it is quite impossible to directly observe it, although its consequences can be easily felt (March, 1978; Elster, 1983). The symbolic mode (Meyer, 1984) results from the interest each stakeholder has in being ambiguous within the group to provide room to accommodate his position with that of others in order to build or restore a sense of consensus. Both the underground and symbolic modes of utilization of models by stakeholders resort to ambiguity to restore internal and external consistency and reach an agreement on the change process. If ambiguity is unavoidable in the underground and symbolic modes, it is not always welcomed in the instrumental mode. In other words, if the instrumental mode can be seen mainly as an ambiguity reducing activity, the underground and symbolic modes are mainly ambiguity producing activities. This "dialectical process" summarizes well the unavoidable complexity that most of the time accompanies model building and implementation activities within an organizational context. Fig. 2 summarizes what has just been said about the different modes of model use. They have the two consubstantial opposite attributes of enabling and constraining those using them. Through their en-

Intrumental mode I Are enabling devices ' ~ TheygenerateImowledgeand promote understanding.

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Symbolicmode [nstmmantsthroughwhich Jaeneedfor restonng externa coherence (bargaining, compromise,consensus) hasto be accommodated.

Fig. 2. Different uses of models.

abling side, models bring clarification and structuration to problematic situations. They generate knowledge and understanding. As such they are instruments for thinking and for suggesting action. As constraining devices, they impose assumptions, hypotheses, perspectives and transparency while their results are never completely predictable. They are a source of uncertainty and threatening for the stakeholders that will tend to react by acting ambiguously with models, first, in an underground mode in order to make room for restoring a personal feeling of consistency and morality; second, in a symbolic mode for restoring external coherence through bargaining, compromise and consensus. Ambiguity is a convenient answer to uncertainty because it allows for adjustment and even change while maintaining a feeling and an image of coherence.

2.2.3. Model legitimisation and change process Let us now explore more precisely the model legitimisation process going on in a change activity involving the use of a model. A model legitimisation process can be looked at as a process taking place within a human construction involving the three main categories of stakeholders of the change pro-

Table 1 The typical modes of involvement of stakeholders Stakeholders interacting Modes of utilization of models with the model Instrumental Underground

Symbolic

OR specialist

Proactively engaged

Reactively engaged

Reactively engaged

Manager

Proactively engaged

Proaclively engaged

Proactively engaged

Third parties (heterogeneous)

Reactively engaged

Proactively engaged

Proactively engaged

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cess already identified: the OR specialist, the manager and the third parties. Some of these stakeholders will interact with the model through the three modes of model use previously identified: the instrumental, the underground and the symbolic. For each of these modes, a stakeholder can be proactively or reactively involved in the sense that he is or is not a conspicuously central, leading, and partaking actor in this mode. Although there is no absolute pattern between the mode of model use and stakeholder type, Table 1 is, nevertheless, an attempt to characterize one which seems to occur often. The traditional 1 OR specialist, because of his training and also because he is the one that usually runs the model, will tend to be actively involved in the instrumental mode. Most of the time, desperately hoping to have "congeal[ed] existing relationships, including power relationships" (Rosenhead, 1989), he is simply forced to react and adjust to the other modes of use by the other stakeholders. Third parties are likely to actively put the emphasis on the underground and symbolic modes since it is through these two modes that they will be able to adjust to the constraining side of models in their quest for adaptation. They are less likely to play an active role in the instrumental mode of use of models. Managers, as defined here, are likely to actively engage in all three modes of model use. To summarize, it is within this human construction, involving three main categories of stakeholders and three modes of model use, with both active and reactive engagement, that the model legitimisation process will take place. Several " c l a i m s " , that is logical ends of arguments (Toulmin, 1958), can be directly or indirectly derived from what has already been said so far about models, legitimacy, and organizational change. Some of them will now be presented. These claims are framed in such a way that they suggest preferred or ideal directions or contexts, and, by way of implication, situations to elude. These claims will b e followed by a set of heuristics that are m o r e indicative

~We use the words "traditional O R " to differentiate them from politically sensitive OR specialists such as Eden (1989), Checkland (1981), or Friend (1989), to name a few of the participants to what Rosenhead (1989) has hailed as a new paradigm of analysis.

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of concrete actions. In our view, taken together, these claims and heuristics increase the likelihood of obtaining legitimate models, though never guaranteeing it. T h i s s e t of claims and heuristics addresses both the enabling side of models (mainly related to the instrumental mode of utilization) and their constraining side (mainly related to the underground and symbolic modes of utilization). The presentation of the claims will be followed by explanations relating them to the preceding arguments or to their backings from the social code. 2.3. Claims Claim 1. As a minimum, a model must be legitimate in the eyes of its "'strategic" stakeholders (while not being unacceptable to its less-strategic stakeholders). The legitimacy of a model for a given stakeholder is the result of that stakeholder's personal judgment on the model and its role in a change process. Since several stakeholders are inevitably involved in such a process, this raises the question of knowing if all the stakeholders have to agree. In our view, to require unanimity is simply tmrealistic. But, as a minimum, the model must be legitimate in the eyes of its "strategic" stakeholders. By "strategic" stakeholders we mean those stakeholders who have the capacity to enable or to hinder the change process because of the importance of their control over resources, their influence, or the like. The strategic stakeholders then comprise the " m a n a g e r " and part of the group of stakeholders we have called up to now "third parties". The strategic stakeholders are those most likely to interact with the model. Nevertheless, the less-strategic stakeholders to a change process may turn out to be strategic stakeholders to the next change process. The new order negotiated between the strategic stakeholders to a given change process should thus take into consideration the interest of the less-strategic stakeholders so that further change remains possible. Claim 2. Since models are instruments for change, their legitimacy depends on their level of usability in the instrumental mode. This claim simply states that models must generate knowledge, promote thinking and understanding,

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and help to formulate decisions and actions. This is however only a necessary condition for a model to be legitimate in the eyes of the stakeholders. The presence of instrumental uses of a model alone cannot provide a basis for model legitimisation, as will be seen shortly. A much larger context needs to be taken into consideration. Claim 3. Since model building and use have cognitive as well as affective consequences on individuals, the legitimacy of a model is partially derived from its potential for accommodating the individual cognitive and affective universe of those interacting with it. This claim, associated with the underground mode of model use, stresses the point that models' output must ultimately be incorporated within the framework of the knowledge, values, and preferences of a stakeholder. A model which is not sufficiently in conformity with the cognitive capacity and the value system of a stakeholder will have little chance of being legitimate for him. Claim 4. Since a model with prescriptive features may please different stakeholders in different ways, the legitimacy of the model is partially derived from its capacity to allow for mutual adjustments between the stakeholders. This claim is associated with the symbolic mode of model use and stresses the point that models must allow for accommodation and have certain features for restoring organizational coherence through bargaining, making compromises, or reaching a consensus. Claim 5. The instrumental, underground, and symbolic modes of model use are concurrently present and may interfere with one another, constructively or destructively in the legitimisation process. This claim states that model legitimacy results from a global judgment made by the stakeholders in a process in which they constantly iterate between the three modes of model use: they do not bear their judgment on a single mode in isolation from the others. The OR specialist is likely to interpret his mandate primarily as a request for an instrumental

use in a problem solving process, and view the model as a means of assisting the manager in that task. He must know that the model he produces is a stake, particularly when stakeholders start to scrutinize it as to which variables are or are not taken into consideration, the implications of the assumptions made, the usability and usefulness of the model, the probable consequences of implementing it. The manager, on the other hand, generally aims to achieve an organizational change. Organizational change is a process in which many stakeholders are involved in one way or another. During that process, the manager has to cope with a diversity of actors and interests through negotiation. Negotiation is a "giveand-take" process and most of it unfolds in the underground and symbolic modes of model use. Ideally, a model should be helpful in assisting the manager in all modes of model use and must have a sufficient level of legitimacy '°potential'' to survive the intricacies of the various organizational behaviours that result from the intended organizational change. Claims 2 to 5 above indicate certain model attributes deemed preferable with respect to the instrumental, underground and symbolic modes of model use. The two following claims characterize more specifically the ways in which a model is used and their connection to legitimacy. Claim 6. Models are instruments that are used to redefine organizational contracts. As shown in Fig. 1, an organizational contract is the result of a series of negotiations and power games that take place between the stakeholders. Such processes are fed with the various interpretations that the participants put forward regarding the current but evolving organizational contract. Models, as cognitive instruments, help actors understand the current contract in new ways which in turn may lead to a redefinition of the contract itself. Claim 7. The way a model is used at a given time depends on the importance of stakes as perceived by various stakeholders. The way a model is used introduces different types of risk and uncertainty to different stakehold-

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ers. Moreover, the importance of a given type of risk and uncertainty may vary with time as well. The importance attached to a particular stake at a given time will determine the way a model is used. In other words, the three modes of model use will take different shapes and meanings as a function of the importance given to the stakes which the stakeholders must deal and live with. In general, the stakeholders will rarely take the risk of binding their fate to the results of a model when consequences may be traumatic, and will not, on the other hand, lose their precious time on insignificant matters either. Moreover, there might always exist some stakes and undeclared intentions which are never explicitly raised or expressed in an organizational setting, such as historical commitments to certain causes, old accounts to settle, social peace in the organization, e t c . Claim 7 has the objective of ensuring that such situations are taken into consideration in model legitimisation processes.

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will vary according to the dominant logics of the various organizational actors. Heuristic 4. The OR specialist should make sure that the possible instrumental uses of the model are well-documented and that the strategic stakeholders of the decision making process are quite knowledgeable about and comfortable with the contents and workings of the model. Heuristic 5. The OR specialist should be prepared to modify or develop a new version of the model, or even completely a new model, if needed, that allows to adequately explore heretofore unforeseen problem formulation and solution alternatives. Heuristic 6. The OR specialist should make sure that the model developed provides a buffer or leaves room for the stakeholders to adjust or readjust themselves to the situation created by the use of the model.

2.4. H e u r i s t i c s

The following heuristics are based on the previous claims and are intended t o translate them in more operational terms. These heuristics are formulated to provide guidelines for OR specialists rather than for other stakeholders. Heuristic 1. The OR specialist should be ready and willing to work in close cooperation with the strategic stakeholders in order to acquire a sound understanding of the organizational contract. In addition, the OR specialist should constantly try to discern the kernel of organizational values from its more contingent part. Heuristic 2. The OR specialist should attempt to strike a balance between the level o f model sophistication/complexity and the competence level of the stakeholders. Model must be adapted both to the task at hand and to the cognitive capacity of the stakeholders. Heuristic 3. The OR specialist should attempt to become familiar with the various logics and preferences prevailing in the organization. This is important since the interpretation and the use of the model

Heuristic 7. The OR specialist should be aware of the preconceived ideas and concepts of the stakeholders regarding problem definition and likely solutions. M a n y decisions in this respect might have been taken implicitly long before they become explicit.

3. The link between model legitimisation and model validation Given what has already been said about the concept of model legitimisation, we are now in a position to compare it with model validation. Again, no attempt will be made here to explain in detail this latter concept: there is indeed an abundant literature on this topic, and furthermore, all OR specialists have at least a reasonable familiarity with it. Our goal in this second part is precisely to take advantage of this familiarity to further improve our knowledge of model legitimisation through comparisons with model validation. Let us start by roughly summarizing the activity of model validation as consisting for the OR specialist in checking if his model is built and operated according to the canons of science. Thus, as with

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model legitimisation, there is, with model validation, a code for ascertaining the validity of models and it is made up of the canons of science. But, one may ask, are those "canons of science" invariant and universally accepted? At the time the field of OR was born, during World War II, the logical positivist canons were largely dominant in science. Those canons were naturally adopted by the pioneers of OR and they still are reflected in most standard textbooks in OR (D6ry, Landry and Banville, 1993). According to the early versions of this doctrine, scientific knowledge (i.e. knowledge produced according to the positivistic canons) was believed to be " t r u e " and, consequently, definitive and cumulative. It is easy to understand why the early OR specialists were so careful in assuring themselves that their models were in conformity with the canons of science as dictated by logical positivism. But since that time, logical positivism's foundations have been shaken. Most of its basic canons have been discredited by fundamental attacks of epistemologists or philosophers of science. Today, there exist at least two schools of thought in OR as to the interpretation of the canons of science or the scientific code: a first school considering the logical positivism's (or some other school's) canons of science as given and definitive and relying on them for model validation, and a second school believing that these canons are subject to change with time. In other words, the former is made up of those believing that there can be only one definitive set of canons for science even if there is not necessarily an agreement as to what those canons are, and the latter adopting a more relativistic view through time of the same canons. Consider indeed some schools of thought that have successively reached a dominant position or at least an undeniable influence in epistemology since the fall of logical positivism: the falsification theory of Popper (1959, Popper (1972), the methodology of scientific research programmes of Lakatos (1970), the relativist model of Kuhn (1970), the sociological perspective of the strong program of Barnes (1974) and Bloor (1976), and the sociology of scientific controversies of Bourdieu (1975), Latour and Woolgar (1979), Knorr-Cetina (1981), etc. Each of these schools of thought has more or less brought with it and suggested new elements to be added to the scientific canons while denying former

ones, with the result that the demarcation line between science and non-science has constantly been modified. Still more important, D6ry, Landry and Banville (1993) have also shown that these schools of thought in epistemology have been echoed in the field of OR where new interpretations as to the nature of models and as to the rules to validate them have been proposed. Thus, when examining the process of model validation, it must be realized that it is largely similar to the process of model legitimisation in the sense that in both cases there is first a process of comparison with a code and second, two views of the code, a traditional one, where the code is given and definitive, and a more contemporary one, where the code is seen as evolving. Nevertheless, the big difference between model validation and model legitimisation is that the code to which the two processes refer is not the same, scientific in the first case and social in the second. If the two codes, the scientific and the social, were identical, there would of course be no difference between model validation and model legitimisation, but they are not. The concern of the believers in the traditional view of the code of science, those OR specialists adhering to the dominant paradigm of operational research (Rosenhead, 1989), has typically been with model validation. But, for the other stakeholders of a model, it is model legitimisation that is of importance. In such a situation, it could be said that when building and implementing a model at the occasion of a change process, the theoretical situations presented in Fig. 3 could arise. The traditional OR specialist will tend to confuse quadrants 1 and 4 and quadrants 2 and 3, since he is only concerned with the validity issue. He will always attempt to avoid quadrants 2 and 3 because, by training, these situations are unacceptable to him. It is then reasonable to believe that each time he ends THE OR SPECIALIST'S PERSPECTIVE VALID OTHER LEGITIMATE STAKEHOLDERS' PERSPECTIVE ILLEGITIMATE

INVALID 1 4

2 3

Fig. 3. Theoretical situations w h e n c o m p a r i n g the validity and legitimacy of models.

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up in one of these cases, he will do everything he can to move away, but this takes time and, taking too much time may switch the model building activity from legitimate to illegitimate. This natural reaction on his part may explain Grayson's complaint that OR models have too long a response time: "Management scientists simply do not sufficiently understand the constraint of time on decision making, and particularly on decisions that count; and the techniques they develop reflect that fact" (Grayson, 1973, p. 43). There remain quadrants 1 and 4 that are equally acceptable for the traditional OR specialist. From an organizational perspective, quadrant 1 is the ideal one to be in because then both the OR specialist and the other stakeholders are in conformity with their respective code; no rejection nor resistance are likely to appear. On the other hand, quadrant 4 is critical. Indeed, since in this case the model is valid, this creates a comfortable situation for the traditional OR specialist to be in. It is nevertheless a likely situation of uneasiness for the stakeholders where resistance or rejection of the model are no more excluded. Fig. 3 has the merit of presenting the issue of "model validation versus model legitimisation" in a transparent dichotomic fashion, where the traditional OR specialist is concerned with model validation, and the stakeholders of the model are concerned with model legitimisation. But qualifications to this interpretation become necessary as soon as one departs from the dominant paradigm of operational research and its view of science. Indeed, the more the OR specialist has reservations with this dominant paradigm of OR, the more he is likely to espouse a view of science embedded into a social context that legitimizes it. He will then be in a position to clearly distinguish between model validation and model legitimisation and to see the necessary links between them. In others words, situations in quadrants 1 and 4, and situations in quadrants 2 and 3 will no more be confused. Thus, a limit of Fig. 3 is that its dimensions should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Science always takes place within a social context, and scientific activities cannot escape judgments as to their legitimacy: a social code always includes a view of science. Science and its prescriptions can then be more or less binding from one society to the next.

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Model validation and model legitimisation, even if they are processes with several similarities, are different in some important respects. It is the merit of Fig. 3 to compel us not to forget it. These differences will vary from one OR specialist to the other depending of their respective view of science and its code. These differences will also vary from one social context to the other and depend, among other things, on the status of science incorporated within the social code ruling that society. The traditional OR specialist that is only concerned with model validation runs into the risk of ending up in quadrant 4, a situation that may account to a significant extent for the fact that models are not used as often as they could be and that models are rejected because they are not seen as legitimate. OR specialists have to take care of the constraining side of their models as well.

4. Conclusion It must be clear by now that model validation and model legitimisation are two overlapping but nevertheless distinct activities. Too often in the past, OR specialists have been concerned with the former and it has been the main purpose of the present paper to show why it is imperative that they should also be concerned with the latter, since, by definition, illegitimate models' outputs are likely to be rejected, one way or another. But, as already mentioned, it is not because:a model is found illegitimate by a specific stakeholder that the whole process of model building and model use :in an organizational context is necessarily jeopardized. A model must at least be legitimate in the e y e s of its "strategic" stakeholders, and somehow a c c o m m o d a t e its less-strategic: stakeholders. :If model legitimisation is an important activity, then it must be realized that, generally speaking, OR specialists are not always well trained to cope with it. Even more, they are often trained to look at the underground and symbolic uses of models as pathologies (Mintzberg, I979) exogenous to the activities of model building and use instead of natural companions o f their instrumental use. In such a context, how can we expect that they be concerned with model legitimisation? Traditional OR specialists

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have cared about the cognitive or instrumental side of their tools. They now have to understand the different ways in which their models are used and be able to explicitly incorporate the socio-political dimension of their activities. As alluded to in the introduction, romantic interpretations of the role of the OR pioneers during World War II are often found in the OR literature. These interpretations are most of the time offered as examples of the " g o o d " way of doing things in OR in order to succeed, as "exemplars" (Kuhn, 1970), and, consequently, as a recipe for getting models accepted and used. One may also suspect that they are perhaps presented to illustrate the way the OR specialists think the stakeholders of OR models should act and react. With these interpretations, one can state that the emphasis is generally put on the development of valid models, and the assumption is implicitly made that if a model is valid, it is also legitimate. These romantic interpretations are misleading first because doubts can be raised as to their "historical" correctness. But, in our view, they are still more misleading because they assimilate the monistic scientific context in which these pioneers were and the type of problems they were tackling, with the present pluralistic scientific context and the much " s o f t e r " situations (involving several categories of stakeholders with diversified interests) OR specialists are now facing. As a consequence, the problem of model legitimisation is simply ignored despite its importance as this paper has shown. More and more OR specialists find themselves uncomfortable with what has been called the dominant paradigm of OR. They are people concerned with model legitimisation even if they do not necessarily use that term. Their contribution to the OR literature is becoming more and more significant, and this paper has briefly pointed out at some of the most important. Nevertheless, much remains to be done and the present paper must be interpreted as a preliminary attempt at formalizing the model legitimisation issue. We have presented a framework to circumscribe the concept of model legitimisation and suggested preliminary propositions to be further investigated. We have also indicated how model legitimisation and model validation are linked together. All of these remain open to discussion and perhaps to revision. But, there is one thing we hope to have

achieved here. It is to convince the reader that it is not only legitimate to investigate the topic of model legitimisation in OR, but that it is essential as well.

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