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

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.