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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400828494
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter