Normal Accidents
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| Author | : Charles Perrow |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 462 |
| Release | : 2011-10-12 |
| Genre | : Technology & Engineering |
| ISBN | : 140082849X |
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.
| Author | : Jean-Christophe Le Coze |
| Publisher | : CRC Press |
| Total Pages | : 177 |
| Release | : 2020-06-15 |
| Genre | : Computers |
| ISBN | : 1000075400 |
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
| Author | : Scott Douglas Sagan |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 306 |
| Release | : 2020-05-05 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0691213062 |
Environmental tragedies such as Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez remind us that catastrophic accidents are always possible in a world full of hazardous technologies. Yet, the apparently excellent safety record with nuclear weapons has led scholars, policy-makers, and the public alike to believe that nuclear arsenals can serve as a secure deterrent for the foreseeable future. In this provocative book, Scott Sagan challenges such optimism. Sagan's research into formerly classified archives penetrates the veil of safety that has surrounded U.S. nuclear weapons and reveals a hidden history of frightening "close calls" to disaster.
| Author | : Charles Perrow |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 430 |
| Release | : 2011-02-07 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1400838517 |
Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In The Next Catastrophe, he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness. Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their size to minimize damage and diminish their attractiveness to terrorists. He focuses on three causes of disaster--natural, organizational, and deliberate--and shows that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow reveals how the threat of catastrophe is on the rise, whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. Along the way, he gives us the first comprehensive history of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security and examines why these agencies are so ill equipped to protect us. The Next Catastrophe is a penetrating reassessment of the very real dangers we face today and what we must do to confront them. Written in a highly accessible style by a renowned systems-behavior expert, this book is essential reading for the twenty-first century. The events of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina--and the devastating human toll they wrought--were only the beginning. When the next big disaster comes, will we be ready? In a new preface to the paperback edition, Perrow examines the recent (and ongoing) catastrophes of the financial crisis, the BP oil spill, and global warming.
| Author | : Harriet McBryde Johnson |
| Publisher | : Macmillan |
| Total Pages | : 242 |
| Release | : 2006-05-02 |
| Genre | : Juvenile Fiction |
| ISBN | : 0805076344 |
Having always prided herself on blending in with "normal" people despite her cerebral palsy, seventeen-year-old Jean begins to question her role in the world while attending a summer camp for children with disabilities.
| Author | : Scott A. Snook |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 276 |
| Release | : 2011-09-19 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 140084097X |
On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing all twenty-six peacekeepers onboard. In response to this disaster the complete array of military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures ran their course. After almost two years of investigation with virtually unlimited resources, no culprit emerged, no bad guy showed himself, no smoking gun was found. This book attempts to make sense of this tragedy--a tragedy that on its surface makes no sense at all. With almost twenty years in uniform and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Lieutenant Colonel Snook writes from a unique perspective. A victim of friendly fire himself, he develops individual, group, organizational, and cross-level accounts of the accident and applies a rigorous analysis based on behavioral science theory to account for critical links in the causal chain of events. By explaining separate pieces of the puzzle, and analyzing each at a different level, the author removes much of the mystery surrounding the shootdown. Based on a grounded theory analysis, Snook offers a dynamic, cross-level mechanism he calls "practical drift"--the slow, steady uncoupling of practice from written procedure--to complete his explanation. His conclusion is disturbing. This accident happened because, or perhaps in spite of everyone behaving just the way we would expect them to behave, just the way theory would predict. The shootdown was a normal accident in a highly reliable organization.
| Author | : Jim Mahaffey |
| Publisher | : Open Road Media |
| Total Pages | : 664 |
| Release | : 2014-02-04 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 1480447749 |
A “delightfully astute” and “entertaining” history of the mishaps and meltdowns that have marked the path of scientific progress (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Radiation: What could go wrong? In short, plenty. From Marie Curie carrying around a vial of radium salt because she liked the pretty blue glow to the large-scale disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, dating back to the late nineteenth century, nuclear science has had a rich history of innovative exploration and discovery, coupled with mistakes, accidents, and downright disasters. In this lively book, long-time advocate of continued nuclear research and nuclear energy James Mahaffey looks at each incident in turn and analyzes what happened and why, often discovering where scientists went wrong when analyzing past meltdowns. Every incident, while taking its toll, has led to new understanding of the mighty atom—and the fascinating frontier of science that still holds both incredible risk and great promise.
| Author | : Chuck Wendig |
| Publisher | : Random House |
| Total Pages | : 544 |
| Release | : 2021-07-20 |
| Genre | : Fiction |
| ISBN | : 1473586828 |
'Move over King, Chuck Wendig is the new voice of modern American horror' Adam Christopher 'A rich, rewarding tale' The Guardian ____________________________________________________________________________ A family returns to their hometown - and to the dark past that haunts them still - in this masterpiece of literary horror by the New York Times bestselling author of Wanderers When Nate's father dies, he leaves behind a final gift for his son: his childhood home. Married now, Nate decides to move in with his wife, Maddie, and their son, Oliver, seeking peace from the chaos of the city. But it doesn't take long before things get strange in the night and even stranger by day. Because Nate was a child being abused by his father, and has never told his family. Because Maddie was a little girl who saw something she shouldn't have. Because something sinister, something hungry, walks in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of this town in rural Pennsylvania... And now, what happened all those years ago is happening again, and this time, it is happening to Oliver. When he meets a strange boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic, he has no idea that what comes next will put his family at the heart of a battle of good versus evil. ____________________________________________________________________________ 'The dread, the scope, the pacing, the turns-I haven't felt all this so intensely since The Shining' - Stephen Graham Jones 'Universally horrifying and viscerally intimate, Wendig brilliantly uses The Book of Accidents to explore a painful truth: in the end, we all haunt ourselves' - Kiersten White
| Author | : Jessie Singer |
| Publisher | : Simon and Schuster |
| Total Pages | : 352 |
| Release | : 2023-02-28 |
| Genre | : Medical |
| ISBN | : 1982129689 |
A journalist recounts the surprising history of accidents and reveals how they’ve come to define all that’s wrong with America. We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators. As the rate of accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the “accident” to avoid consequences for their actions. Born of the death of her best friend, and the killer who insisted it was an accident, this book is a moving investigation of the sort of tragedies that are all too common, and all too commonly ignored. In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.
| Author | : Diane Poole Heller |
| Publisher | : North Atlantic Books |
| Total Pages | : 233 |
| Release | : 2001-10-26 |
| Genre | : Medical |
| ISBN | : 1556433727 |
Trauma following automobile accidents can persist for weeks, months, or longer. Symptoms include nervousness, sleep disorders, loss of appetite, and sexual dysfunction. In Crash Course, Diane Poole Heller and Laurence Heller take readers through a series of case histories and exercises to explain and treat the health problems and trauma brought on by car accidents.
