Commentary on the Researcher and the Manager

In the February, 1965 issue of Management Science, the authors wrote an article entitled, The Researcher and the Manager: A Dialectic of Implementation, in which they proposed an area of research on the problem of proper relationships between the applied scientist and the manager in today's society. They displayed four possible relationships between scientist and manager which were suggested by different meanings of implementation found in the literature: the separate-function position, the communication position, the persuasion position, and the mutual understanding position. Their four-way classification produced a variety of informal comments as did the implied assumption that inmplementation is a valid area of scientific inquiry. They decided that these issues were important enough to warrant inviting a number of people who have thought about the problem of implementation in depth to contribute remarks on their paper to Management Science. These remarks appear in this commentary.