摘要：During the past two decades, we have seen an increasing development and use of the so-called soft approaches within OR and other related disciplines. Moreover, recent OR textbooks as Daellenback (1994) and Pidd (1996) include in their contents both hard and soft approaches. Although, it is clear what is meant by the concept "hard approaches" the situation is not the same with the concept "soft approaches". There are many soft approaches being somehow similar, somehow different. Therefore, we believe that there is a need for a more systematic characterisation of soft approaches. The main purpose of this paper is to carry out an inquiry process with the purpose of characterising the so-called soft approaches. We believe that such an inquiry will be useful to get a multi-dimensional insight on the properties of some selected soft approaches. In section 2, we discuss the question: "What are soft approaches?" Two central, classical references on this question are presented and critically discussed. In section 3, we select six soft approaches for further study and for concreteness of our arguments. The selected soft approaches are described in section 4 in terms of function and methodological approach. In section 5, we present a general framework for characterisation of soft approaches. Section 6 includes an overall characterisation made of the selected approaches. Section 7 presents some thoughts about the limitations of the presented framework while the last section, section 8, presents the conclusions.
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