*GI: Your doctoral research focused on an emergent field of management science: operational research. How was this research object formed? In what ways has this focus been sustained in your practice over the past 50 years? Why do you think it has had a continuing significance?* Operational research - A pivotal research object It began as a historical investigation. Gary Werskey had been documenting the 'Left scientists' movement' of the period between WWI and WWII, and he pointed out to me that many of the Left scientists had contributed during WWII to what was tagged 'operational' research (generally referred to post-war as **OR**). But by 1970 this field was manifestly part of the machinery of what was then being called monopoly capitalism. I was ashamed of that 'Left' generation. I wanted to understand what it was about being 'Left' that made the movement so enlistable by capital.
Long story short: as Fordism passed into post-Fordism, the desires of those 'Left' scientists for status and funding and 'social usefulness' were met by capital, through the expansion of the 'professional-managerial class' and through a systamtic commitment to 'innovation' and science policy/R&D budgets, as cultural-economic-political institutions. The first generation quickly went back to state-funded 'real' science, the Royal Society, Nobel Prizes, etc. And a second generation of technicians was put in their place, working with math techniques largely from the USA, and seeking impact or usefulness through integration into corporate institutions and managerial elites.
My historical investigation became a 'theory of practice' study (thus, was examined by two philosophers). I noted a broad division within OR, between the application of mathematical-numerical techniques and the production of 'answers' on one hand, and the production of *enquiries and actionable knowledges* on the other. The latter emphasis was prominent in the work of C West Churchman on 'the design of enquiring systems'. A philosopher, he raided the back catalogue of 19th century philosophy to arrive at proposals for the **in-situ production** of actionable knowledges 'at the point of use' - like OR: *operational* research. This was resonant with many approaches at the time (1970-78): in the history of ideas, 'the social construction of knowledge' and in the theory-of-practice tradition(s) of Marxism including the Gramscian principle of organicness.
The thesis attempted to characterise what *radical* and operational research might be. But it started me on an investigation that was more radical than 'radical science': the radical production and mobilisation of radical knowledges and radical capabilities, under many modes of rigour - not merely the hegemonic modes of 20th century Big Science or Kuhnian normal science - in a basically plural, multi-modal weave or ecology.
> Mike Hales (1978). *Operational research and the forces of production - A Marxist analysis of science and ideaology*, DPhil thesis, University of Sussex. pdf 
It was an interpretation of Gramsci's principle of **'organic intellectual'** practice, in-and-for socialist struggle. That's continued for 50 years; continues. Thus, although my work has always been around struggle around producing and mobilising of technologies - concretely configured as **infrastructures** of wage-work and civil-society organising - it has always attended to the production of the capability to know-and-do. Thus it always has also been a matter of radical (oppositional, struggle-informing) 'science' and critique of (so-called) science as a narrow version of radical, capable knowledge(ing) practice.