Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies - Updated Edition / Edition 1

by Charles Perrow

Overview

Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety—building in more warnings and safeguards—fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk—complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling—this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them.


The first edition fulfilled one reviewer's prediction that it "may mark the beginning of accident research." In the new afterword to this edition Perrow reviews the extensive work on the major accidents of the last fifteen years, including Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger disaster. The new postscript probes what the author considers to be the "quintessential 'Normal Accident'" of our time: the Y2K computer problem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691004129
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	10/17/1999
Series:	Princeton Paperbacks
Edition description:	Updated edition with a New afterword and a new postscript by the author
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	525,953
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Charles Perrow is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. His other books include The Radical Attack on Business, Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, and The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation.

Table of Contents

Abnormal Blessings vii

Introduction 3

1. Normal Accident at Three Mile Island 15

2. Nuclear Power as a High-Risk System: Why We Have Not Had More TMIs—But Will Soon 32

3. Complexity, Coupling, and Catastrophe 62

4. Petrochemical Plants 101

5. Aircraft and Airways 123

6. Marine Accidents 170

7. Earthbound Systems: Dams, Quakes, Mines, and Lakes 232

8. Exotics: Space, Weapons, and DNA 256

9. Living with High-Risk Systems 304

Afterword 353

Postscript: The Y2K Problem 388

List of Acronyms 413

Notes 415

Bibliography 426

Index 441

Editorial Reviews

"[Normal Accidents is] a penetrating study of catastrophes and near catastrophes in several high-risk industries. Mr. Perrow ... writes lucidly and makes it clear that ‘normal' accidents are the inevitable consequences of the way we launch industrial ventures.... An outstanding analysis of organizational complexity."—-John Pfeiffer, The New York Times

"[Perrow's] research undermines promises that ‘better management' and ‘more operator training' can eliminate catastrophic accidents. In doing so, he challenges us to ponder what could happen to justice, community, liberty, and hope in a society where such events are normal."—-Deborah A. Stone, Technology Review

"Normal Accidents is a testament to the value of rigorous thinking when applied to a critical problem."—-Nick Pidgeon, Nature

From the Publisher

Normal Accidents is a testament to the value of rigorous thinking when applied to a critical problem.

Nature - Nick Pidgeon

[Normal Accidents is] a penetrating study of catastrophes and near catastrophes in several high-risk industries. Mr. Perrow ... writes lucidly and makes it clear that 'normal' accidents are the inevitable consequences of the way we launch industrial ventures.... An outstanding analysis of organizational complexity.

The New York Times - John Pfeiffer

[Perrow's] research undermines promises that 'better management' and 'more operator training' can eliminate catastrophic accidents. In doing so, he challenges us to ponder what could happen to justice, community, liberty, and hope in a society where such events are normal.

Technology Review - Deborah A. Stone

[Perrow's] research undermines promises that 'better management' and 'more operator training' can eliminate catastrophic accidents. In doing so, he challenges us to ponder what could happen to justice, community, liberty, and hope in a society where such events are normal.
— Deborah A. Stone

Technology Review

Normal Accidents is a testament to the value of rigorous thinking when applied to a critical problem.
— Nick Pidgeon

Nature

[Normal Accidents is] a penetrating study of catastrophes and near catastrophes in several high-risk industries. Mr. Perrow ... writes lucidly and makes it clear that 'normal' accidents are the inevitable consequences of the way we launch industrial ventures.... An outstanding analysis of organizational complexity.
— John Pfeiffer

The New York Times

On the other hand, we may have simply postponed the kind of debacle that would force us into a reexamination of complex, hazardous technologies such as nuclear power. In particular, the increasing ubiquity of the Internet, to which every thermostat and sprinkler system in the world may soon be linked, is creating the potential for an epidemic of computer viruses or other disruptions on an unprecedented scale. There will never be another year 2000, but I suspect this won't be the last edition of Normal Accidents.
— Technology Review

Wade Roush

Mr. Perrow found that the organizations designed to run and safeguard modern technology were so complex and so tightly integrated that accidents are inevitable, or ''normal,'' even when all the proper safety procedures are followed. Thus, disasters like the near-meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger cannot be traced to discrete errors or blamed solely on ''operator error,'' as has been the typical approach in the past. They are the natural result of the systems themselves. They are accidents that are inconceivable -- until they happen.
— New York Times

Lawrence Zuckerman