Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies / Charles Perrow ; with a new afterword and a postscript on the Y2K problem.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Perrow, Charles.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Industrial accidents.

Technology--Risk assessment.

Technology.

Accidents.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (779 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

ABNORMAL BLESSINGS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. Normal Accident at Three Mile Island

CHAPTER 2. Nuclear Power as a High-Risk System: Why We Have Not Had More TMIs-But Will Soon

CHAPTER 3. Complexity, Coupling, and Catastrophe

CHAPTER 4. Petrochemical Plants

CHAPTER 5. Aircraft and Airways

CHAPTER 6. Marine Accidents

CHAPTER 7. Earthbound Systems: Dams, Quakes, Mines, and Lakes

CHAPTER 8. Exotics: Space, Weapons, and DNA

CHAPTER 9. Living with High-Risk Systems

AFTERWORD

POSTSCRIPT: THE Y 2 K PROBLEM

LIST OF ACRONYMS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Originally published: New York : Basic Books, 1984.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 426-439) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Nov 2019)

ISBN:

1-283-37980-5

9786613379801

1-4008-2849-X

OCLC:

843204302