Charles Perrow takes a particularly negative view of the possibility of safe management of high-risk technologies in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. His summary of the Three Mile Island accident is illustrative: “The system caused the accident, not the operators” (12). Perrow’s account of TMI is chiefly an account of complex and tightly-coupled system processes, …
Why do regulatory organizations fail?
Why is Charles Perrow a pessimist about government regulation? Perrow is a leading researcher in the sociology of organizations, and he is a singular expert on accidents and failures. Several of his books are classics in their field -- Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and …
Organizations as open systems
Key to understanding the "ontology of government" is the empirical and theoretical challenge of understanding how organizations work. The activities of government encompass organizations across a wide range of scales, from the local office of the Department of Motor Vehicles (40 employees) to the Department of Defense (861,000 civilian employees). Having the best understanding possible …
O-rings and production pressure
Allan McDonald's Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster (2009) has given me a somewhat different understanding of the Challenger launch disaster than I've gained from other sources, including Diane Vaughan's excellent book The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. McDonald is a Morton Thiokol (MTI) insider who was present through …
Regulatory delegation at the FAA
Earlier posts have focused on the role of inadequate regulatory oversight as part of the tragedy of the Boeing 737 MAX (link, link). (Also of interest is an earlier discussion of the "quiet power" through which business achieves its goals in legislation and agency rules (link).) Reporting in the New York Times this week by …
Organizational culture
It is of both intellectual and practical interest to understand how organizations function and how the actors within them choose the actions that they pursue. A common answer to these questions is to refer to the rules and incentives of the organization, and then to attempt to understand the actor's choices through the lens of …
The US Chemical Safety Board
The Federal agency responsible for investigating chemical and petrochemical accidents in the United States is the Chemical Safety Board (link). The mission of the Board is described in these terms: The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the agency’s board members are appointed by the …
Testing the NRC
Serious nuclear accidents are rare but potentially devastating to people, land, and agriculture. (It appears that minor to moderate nuclear accidents are not nearly so rare, as James Mahaffey shows in Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima.) Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are disasters that …
Pervasive organizational and regulatory failures
It is intriguing to observe how pervasive organizational and regulatory failures are in our collective lives. Once you are sensitized to these factors, you see them everywhere. A good example is in the business section of today's print version of the New York Times, August 1, 2019. There are at least five stories in this …
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Herbert Simon’s theories of organizations
Herbert Simon made paradigm-changing contributions to the theory of rational behavior, including particularly his treatment of "satisficing" as an alternative to "maximizing" economic rationality (link). It is therefore worthwhile examining his views of organizations and organizational decision-making and action -- especially given how relevant those theories are to my current research interest in organizational dysfunction. …
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Understanding Society 