Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies - Updated Edition

Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 0691004129 ISBN13: 9780691004129 Release Date: September 1999 Publisher: Princeton University Press Length: 464 Pages Weight: 1.48 lbs. Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.2" 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 re