Content area
Full Text
The Launch of STS-51L
As a social scientist who has spent the last several years doing research with an engineer, I have a significant appreciation for Diane Vaughan's tenacity in taking on an engineer's story, because engineering and social science paradigms and foci of interest are as different as night and day. Her task was complicated by entering a world of specialized language. As we all know, specialized languages have a number of functions, one of which is to keep outsiders out. As Weick comments, "the beauty of Vaughan's analysis is that she digs both deeper and higher, which shows all of us the story of tragedy is not one of mere tactics and operations." She provides the first sociologically informed, indepth micro-macro analysis of a tragedy. While other indepth analyses of disasters exist (e.g., Shrivastava, 1987; Davidson, 1990; Medvedev, 1990; Read, 1993), they are informed by different perspectives that cannot link micro and macro organizational theory. Vaughan explicates the sociology of mistake as embedded in the banalities of organizational life.
An obvious response to experiencing disasters associated with large-scale, technologically complex systems is to look for the culprit. Until Barry Turner's Man-Made Disasters, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents, Paul Shrivastava's Bhopal: Anatomy of a Crisis, and James Reason's Human Error, almost everyone did that. Today, because of these contributions and Vaughan's, researchers are less likely to do that. Most accident investigations and the media, however, continue the frenzied search for the operator perpetrator, the "diabolical" theory of error probably being the sexiest. There are two obvious reasons for this. If one can find the single culprit, a quick fix is readily apparent: get rid of him or her. And digging into the system to find the real causes is too much trouble, as exemplified by Vaughan's scholarly and patient work.
Vaughan actually begins to take the path to the perpetrator, initially hoping to set her work within the sociological frameworks of family violence and police misconduct. This causes her to focus initially on the possibility of amoral calculators engaging in heinous acts in organizations. Fortunately, her methodology forces her away from this approach, but one of the things I wished about the book is that she had left it sooner. Most organizational tragedies unfold in...