INCLUSION CRITERIA
An entry belongs in this tradition if and only if the method was developed in the European and North American professional literature of technique.
Geography: Western Europe and North America — the corporate research and consulting sector, the management and design schools, the military and industrial engineering establishments, and the psychological laboratories adjacent to them.
Time: c. 1940 to the present. This bound is narrower than the label and deliberately so. "Western" as a civilizational term would run from the Presocratics and would then admit everything and exclude nothing, which is not a criterion; what this folder actually holds is the technique literature that begins with wartime operations research and industrial engineering and continues through the postwar creativity, quality, and management movements. Ancient inheritance is admitted only where the modern procedure is the entry — Socratic questioning is here as an elicitation technique with a specified protocol, not as Plato.
Required: All of the following:
- The collection's root criteria: a procedure, a mechanism, and stated limitations
- A datable origin in the literature: the author, publication, or programme that first specified the procedure
- Development within the bounds above, or an ancient inheritance whose modern procedural specification is what the entry catalogues
Not sufficient: A branded repackaging of an existing method under a new acronym, where nothing in the procedure changed. A framework or ontology, however widely taught — the root criteria exclude these and this folder is where they most often try to enter. A method whose only evidence is its own promotional literature.
Boundary: This tradition is the collection's default bin and that is its weakness rather than a feature: a method with no attributable lineage tends to land here because the alternative is landing nowhere, and the "Not sufficient" clauses above are load-bearing for that reason. Where a method has a specific national or institutional lineage that the entry can name — Toyota, an Academy institute, a Nyāya school — it belongs to that tradition and not here. Where a Western author's contribution is an account of another tradition's practice, the entry is Western and the tradition it describes is the subject, not the provenance.