4COMPLEXITY, CONTROL AND SOCIOLOGICAL MODELS
NORMAL ACCIDENT THEORY
Highly technological systems such as aviation, air traffic control, telecommunications, nuclear power, space missions, and medicine include potentially disastrous failure modes. These systems, consistent with the barrier idea in the previous chapter, usually have multiple redundant mechanisms, safety systems, and elaborate policies and procedures to keep them from failing in ways that produce bad outcomes. The results of combined operational and engineering measures make these systems relatively safe from single point failures; that is, they are protected against the failure of a single component or procedure directly leading to a bad outcome. But the paradox, says Perrow (1984), ...
Get Behind Human Error, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
