International Relations

image: Adolf von Menzel,  The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) Readers may have noticed that my current research interests have to do with organizational dysfunction and largescale technology failures. I am interested in probing the ways in which organizational failures and dysfunctions have contributed to large accidents like Bhopal, Fukushima, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I've had to confront an important question in taking on this research interest: what can philosophy bring to the topic that would not be better handled by engineers, organizational specialists, or public policy experts? One answer is the diversity of viewpoint that a philosopher can bring to the discussion. It is evident that technology failures invite analysis from all of these specialized experts, and more. But there is room for productive contribution from reflective observers who are not committed to any of these disciplines. Philosophers have a long history of taking on big topics outside the defi

In 2011 James Scott gave a pair of Tanner Lectures at Harvard. He had chosen a topic for which he felt he had a fairly good understanding, having taught on early agrarian societies throughout much of his career. The topic was the origins of the earliest states in human history. But as he explains in the preface to the 2017 book  Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States , preparation for the lectures led him into brand new debates, bodies of evidence, and theories which were pretty much off his personal map. The resulting book is his effort to bring his own understanding up to date, and it is a terrific and engaging book. Scott gives a quick summary of the view of early states, nutrition, agriculture, and towns that he shared with most historians of early civilizations up through a few decades ago. Hunter-gatherer human groups were the primary mode of living for tens of thousands of years at the dawn of civilization. Humanity learned to domesticate plants and animals, cr

An ongoing thread of posts here is concerned with organizational causes of large technology failures. The driving idea is that failures, accidents, and disasters usually have a dimension of organizational causation behind them. The corporation, research office, shop floor, supervisory system, intra-organizational information flow, and other social elements often play a key role in the occurrence of a gas plant fire, a nuclear power plant malfunction, or a military disaster. There is a tendency to look first and foremost for one or more individuals who made a mistake in order to explain the occurrence of an accident or technology failure; but researchers such as Perrow, Vaughan, Tierney, and Hopkins have demonstrated in detail the importance of broadening the lens to seek out the social and organizational background of an accident. It seems important to distinguish between system flaws and organizational dysfunction in considering all of the kinds of accidents mentioned here. We might s

An issue which is of concern to anyone who receives treatment in a hospital is the topic of patient safety. How likely is it that there will be a serious mistake in treatment -- wrong-site surgery , incorrect medication or radiation dose , exposure to a hospital-acquired infection ? The current evidence is alarming. (Martin Makary et al estimate that over 250,000 deaths per year result from medical mistakes -- making medical error now the third leading cause of mortality in the United States ( link ).) And when these events occur, where should we look for assigning responsibility -- at the individual providers, at the systems that have been implemented for patient care, at the regulatory agencies responsible for overseeing patient safety? Medical accidents commonly demonstrate a complex interaction of factors, from the individual provider to the technologies in use to failures of regulation and oversight. We can look at a hospital as a place where caring professionals do their best to