Conventional wisdom holds that the original objectives of management science were to promote economic efficiency and financial returns; the pursuit of goals loftier than moneymaking is seen as a recent development. But this isn’t the full picture. At its roots, the discipline is also closely aligned with current thinking about organizational purpose and managing with a broad community of stakeholders in mind. Today’s conversations about corporate social responsibility are not moving away from the principles of scientific management; they’re returning to them. Anyone who has studied management will likely have been taught that the field’s founder is the efficiency-obsessed Frederick Winslow Taylor. The notion attributed to Taylor — that economic efficiency is management’s fundamental principle — reigned in the 20th century and into the 21st. Administration expert Luther Gulick wrote in 1937 that for management, “whether public or private, the basic ‘good’ is efficiency.” Management guru Peter Drucker echoed the idea in 1946, stating that “the purpose of the corporation is to be economically efficient.” More recently, management thinker Gary Hamel has perpetuated the view that “management was invented to solve the problem of inefficiency.”...

Six MIT faculty members are among more than 250 leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced Thursday. One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy publications, as well as studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture, and education. Those elected from MIT this year are: “The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites, and they have led in board rooms and courtrooms,” said academy President David W. Oxtoby. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the academy’s work to advance the public good.”...

Companies today are swimming in data — but how do we build a data strategy that creates value?...

In recent years, criticism has been levelled at economics for being insular and unconcerned about real-world problems. But a new study led by MIT scholars finds the field increasingly overlaps with the work of other disciplines, and, in a related development, has become more empirical and data-driven, while producing less work of pure theory. The study examines 140,000 economics papers published over a 45-year span, from 1970 to 2015, tallying the “extramural” citations that economics papers received in 16 other academic fields — ranging from other social sciences such as sociology to medicine and public health. In seven of those fields, economics is the social science most likely to be cited, and it is virtually tied for first in citations in another two disciplines. In psychology journals, for instance, citations of economics papers have more than doubled since 2000. Public health papers now cite economics work twice as often as they did 10 years ago, and citations of economics research in fields from operations research to computer science have risen sharply as well....