Post Normal Accident: Revisiting Perrow's Classic / Edition 1

by Jean-Christophe Le Coze

Overview

Post Normal Accident revisits Perrow’s classic Normal Accident published in 1984 and provides additional insights to our sociological view of safety-critical organisations. The operating landscape of high-risk systems has indeed profoundly changed in the past 20 to 30 years but the core sociological models of safety remain associated with classics of the 1980s and 1990s.

This book examines the conceptual and empirical evolutions of the past two to three decades to explore their implications for safety management based on several strands of works in various research traditions in safety (e.g. cognitive engineering and system safety, high-reliability organisation, sociology of safety, regulatory studies) and other interdisciplinary fields (e.g. international business, globalisation studies, strategy management, ecology).

It offers a new and insightful interpretation to the challenges of today. It investigates how globalisation has reconfigured the operating landscape of high-risk systems and emphasises the importance of thinking safety through a strategic angle. This book serves as an ideal resource for the safety professionals and safety researchers from any established disciplines such as sociology, engineering, psychology, political science or management.

Features:

• Introduces an original analysis of popular safety writings, including Normal Accident, by Perrow
• Identifies the importance of thinking safety from a sociological angle with the help of key writers
• Stresses the need for greater sensitivity to strategy and "errors from the top" when it comes to the safety of high-risk systems
• Explains how globalisation has reconfigured the operating landscape of high-risk systems
• Renews our understanding of the current safety management challenges in an increasingly global risk picture

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367502287
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jean-Christophe Le Coze is a safety researcher (PhD, Mines ParisTech) at INERIS, the French national institute for environmental safety. His activities combine ethnographic studies and action research in various safety-critical systems, with an empirical, theoretical, historical and epistemological orientation.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Author xv

1 One Book, Two Theses (NA and na) 1

Introduction 1

The Reception of Normal Accident 2

Singling Out and Comparing High-Risk Systems in the 1980s 2

Critics of Perrow's Technological Determinism 4

Component Accidents versus Normal (or System) Accident 5

Hopkins' Refutation of Normal Accident 5

Hopkins' Omission: The Extended Version of Normal Accident 7

Charles Perrow's Sociology 9

Seven Related Books 9

A Set of Interwoven Studies 9

Perrow's Sociology of Organisations 11

The Context of the 1960s 11

Four Key Dimensions: Technology, Structure, Goals and Environment 13

The Society of Organisations 15

A Summary of Perrow's Sociology 17

Normal Accident, the Second Thesis 18

Reintroducing the Book 18

Sources of Tension When Writing Normal Accident 19

Beyond the Technological Rationale 20

The Case of the Challenger 21

A Neo-Weberian Approach to Disasters 21

Task: A Cognitive Layer of Analysis 22

Goal and Structure: An Organisational/Managerial Layer of Analysis 23

Environment: A Macrosystem Layer of Analysis 25

Summary 25

Implications of the Second Thesis 28

What Does "Normal" Mean? 28

Does the Book Normal Accident Make Any Sense? 29

Was Perrow Right for the Wrong Reasons? 30

A New Version of Normal Accident? 31

Some Limits of Perrow's Argument 31

Summary of Chapter 1 32

2 Hopkins, the Unofficial Theorist of NA 35

Introduction 35

Hopkins, the Storyteller 36

Studying and Visualising Accidents 36

What Do We See in This Picture? 36

Visualisations of Hopkins and Perrow 41

Writing Successful Stories 43

A Narrative Structure 43

An Example of Narrative Structure: Auditing 44

Theory of the Second Thesis 49

The 1980s: Critical White-Collar Crime Model of Accident 49

2000s-2010s: A Normative Theory of Safety 51

Technology (Task), Structure, Goal and Environment 54

(Safety) Culture 56

Back to the Longford Case 58

Confronting the Second Thesis of Normal Accident 58

The Complexity Argument 58

A Sophisticated, Hidden, Normative Model of Safety 59

A New Formulation of the High-Reliability Organisation versus Normal Accident Debate? 61

Summary of Chapter 2 65

3 Errors from the Top 67

Introduction 67

The Obviousness of Strategy 68

Failing Executives and Corporate Malfeasance 68

Organisations at and beyond the Limits 71

What We Know about Human Errors 73

Safety as Strategy 74

The Importance of Strategy for Businesses 74

Linear, Adaptive and Interpretive Views of Strategy 75

Power of Executives and Top Managers 76

Framing Strategy 78

What We Know about Strategic Failures 79

Analysing Strategic Failures 79

Degree of Strategic Failure 81

Defining and Summarising Strategy in the Context of Post Normal Accident 82

Illustrating Safety as Strategy 84

Silo Case 86

Pyro Case 87

Petro Case 89

Safety as Strategy 90

Making Sense of the Three Cases from a Strategic Angle 90

Strategic Mistake, Failure or Fiasco? 92

A New Hindsight Bias? 94

Problem of Strategy or of Strategy Implementation? 95

A New Reductionism? 96

Summary of Chapter 3 98

4 From Component to Network Failure Accidents 99

Introduction 99

Globalisation: A Very Short Overview 100

Globalisation, a Central Notion 100

A First Controversy: Is Globalisation Really New? 101

A Second Controversy: Is Globalisation Good or Bad? 102

A Third Controversy: Is Globalisation a Process of Uniformity? 102

Beyond the Controversies 103

Connecting Globalisation to High-Risk Systems 103

Postbureaucracy 104

Postregulatory State 104

Studies on Globalisation in the Field of Safety 104

Externalisation 105

Standardisation (and Bureaucratisation) 106

Financialisation 108

Digitalisation 109

Self-Regulation 110

Combining Studies 111

Back to Normal Accident 112

A New, Post Normal Accident, Operating Landscape 112

Hopkins' View and Globalisation 113

The Story of BP, the Strategic Fiasco of a Multinational 115

Browne's Legacy 116

The Networked Firm 118

A Postbureaucratic Strategy and Postregulatory State Failures 119

Globalised Trends in the BP Case 120

Financialisation 120

Digitalisation 120

Externalisation 120

Financialisation 121

Standardisation 121

Self-Regulation 121

From Component Failure to Network Failure Accidents 121

Summary of Chapter 4 123

5 (Global) Eco-Socio-Technological Systems: Expanding Scale, Scope and Timeframe 125

Introduction 125

Expanding Scope, Scale and Time Frame 126

High-Risk Systems and Socio technological Risks 126

Globalisation and Systemic Risks 127

Anthropocene, Transhumanism and Existential Risks 129

Widening and Complexifying the Risk Picture 132

Embedded Risk Categories: Complex Interactions 136

Loop A: Causal Circularity between High-Risk Systems and Globalisation 137

Loop B: Causal Circularity between Globalisation and Anthropocene/Transhumanism 138

Rethinking Perrow's Matrix 139

Scale of Governance and Magnitude of Impact 139

Eco-Socio-Technological Disasters 141

The Case of Fukushima Daichi 141

General Complexity 142

Summary of Chapter 5 145

6 Conclusion 147

Two Opposite Theses in One Book 148

Hopkins, an Unofficial Theorist for the Second Thesis of Normal Accident 148

Errors from the Top (versus Sharp-End Human Errors) 149

Network Failure Accidents (versus Component Failure Accidents) 149

From Technical to Eco-Socio-Technological Disasters 150

References 151

Index 165