ABSTRACT
The development of the electronic digital computer has been an extremely significant technological innovation for science, probably ranking on a par with the inventions of the telescope and the microscope. As the first such computer, the ENIAC, was completed less than twenty years ago, our experience with electronic computers is still too limited for anyone to predict the ultimate significance which these machines will have in both the natural and the social sciences. However, our knowledge has increased so rapidly from the years immediately after World War II, when computers were viewed only as larger and faster desk calculators, that it seems worth while to examine some of the implications which electronic digital computers have for research methodology in the study of organizations.
