Daniel Little
image: Adolf von Menzel, The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) Readers may have noticed that my current research interests have to do with organizational dysfunction and largescale technology failures. I am interested in probing the ways in which organizational failures and dysfunctions have contributed to large accidents like Bhopal, Fukushima, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I've …
Continue reading "Philosophy and the study of technology failure"
In 2011 James Scott gave a pair of Tanner Lectures at Harvard. He had chosen a topic for which he felt he had a fairly good understanding, having taught on early agrarian societies throughout much of his career. The topic was the origins of the earliest states in human history. But as he explains in …
TMI control room An ongoing thread of posts here is concerned with organizational causes of large technology failures. The driving idea is that failures, accidents, and disasters usually have a dimension of organizational causation behind them. The corporation, research office, shop floor, supervisory system, intra-organizational information flow, and other social elements often play a key …
An issue which is of concern to anyone who receives treatment in a hospital is the topic of patient safety. How likely is it that there will be a serious mistake in treatment -- wrong-site surgery, incorrect medication or radiation dose, exposure to a hospital-acquired infection? The current evidence is alarming. (Martin Makary et al …
A recent post comments on the value of biography as a source of insight into history and thought. Currently I am reading Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), which I am finding fascinating both for its portrayal of the evolution of a brilliant and unconventional mathematician as well as the honest efforts Hodges makes to describe …
I have always found biographies a particularly interesting source of learning and stimulation. A recent example is a biography and celebration of Muthuvel Kalaignar Karunanidhi published in a recent issue of the Indian semi-weekly Frontline. Karunanidhi was an enormously important social and political leader in India for over sixty years in the Dravidian movement in …
Deepwater Horizon disaster Andrew Hopkins is a much-published expert on industrial safety who has an important set of insights into the causes of industrial accidents. Much of his career has focused on the oil and gas industry, but he has written on other sectors as well. Particularly interesting are several books: Failure to Learn: The BP …
Scientific fields are shaped by many apparently contingent and capricious facts. This is one of the key insights of science and technology studies. And yet eventually it seems that scientific communities succeed in going beyond the limitations of these somewhat arbitrary starting points. The human sciences are especially vulnerable to this kind of arbitrariness, and …
David Sanger's very interesting recent book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, is a timely read this month, following the indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC in 2015. Sanger is a national security writer for the New York Times, and has covered cyber security issues for …
I've argued for the idea that social phenomena are generated by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of myriad actors (link). This expresses the idea of ontological individualism. But I also believe that social arrangements -- structures, ideologies, institutions -- have genuine effects on the actions of individual actors and populations of actors and on …
Understanding Society 