International Relations

The topic of the organizational causes of technology failure comes up frequently in Understanding Society . The tragic crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in the past year present an important case to study. Is this an instance of pilot error (as has occasionally been suggested)? Is it a case of engineering and design failures? Or are there important corporate and regulatory failures that created the environment in which the accidents occurred, as the public record seems to suggest? The formal accident investigations are not yet complete, and the FAA and other air safety agencies around the world have not yet approved the aircraft for flight following the suspension of certification following the second crash. There will certainly be a detailed and expert case study of this case at some point in the future, and I will be eager to read the resulting book. In the meantime, though, it is  useful to bring the perspectives of Charles Perrow, Diane Vaughan, and Andrew Hopkins to bear ...

The fields of organizational studies and organizational sociology originated in the early twentieth century but flourished in the post-war period. This makes a certain amount of historical sense. The emergence in the nineteenth century of large, complex organizations in business and government became a factor in modern society that dwarfed the impact of the organizations of the past -- universities, religious societies, and guilds. There was therefore a new sociological topic that demanded study. How do corporations and large government departments work? What concepts permit insightful analysis of large, complex organizations? Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy provided a beginning, but organizations proved to have greater variety and more perplexing features than Weber's ideas could account for. Large, complex organizations are the most pervasive social structure in the modern world. They structure the food we eat, the ways we work, the compensation we receive for our labors, t...

A recurring theme in recent months in Understanding Society is organizational dysfunction and the organizational causes of technology failure. Helmut Anheier's volume When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns is highly relevant to this topic, and it makes for very interesting reading. The volume includes contributions by a number of leading scholars in the sociology of organizations. And yet the volume seems to miss the mark in some important ways. For one thing, it is unduly focused on the question of "mortality" of firms and other organizations. Bankruptcy and organizational death are frequent synonyms for "failure" here. This frame is evident in the summary the introduction offers of existing approaches in the field: organizational aspects, political aspects, cognitive aspects, and structural aspects. All bring us back to the causes of extinction and bankruptcy in a business organization. Further, the approach highlights the importance of...

The recent crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft raise questions about the safety certification process through which this modified airframe was certified for use by the FAA. Recent accounts of the design and manufacture of the aircraft demonstrate an enormous pressure for speed and great pressure to reduce costs. Attention has focused on a software system, MCAS, which was a feature needed to adapt to the aerodynamics created by repositioning of larger engines on the existing 737 body. The software was designed to automatically intervene to prevent stall if a single sensor in the nose indicated unacceptable angle of ascent. The crash investigations are not complete, but current suspicions are that the pilots in the two aircraft were unable to control or disable the nose-down response of the system in the roughly 40 seconds they had to recover control of the aircraft. (James Fallows provides a good and accessible account of the details of the development of the 737 MAX in a story i...

Readers may be skeptical about the practical importance of the topic of nuclear power plant siting decisions, since very few new nuclear plants have been proposed or approved in the United States for decades. However, the topic is one for which there is an extensive historical record, and it is a process that illuminates the challenge for government to balance risk and benefit, private gain and public cost.  Moreover, siting inherently brings up issues that are both of concern to the public in general (throughout a state or region of the country) and to the citizens who live in close proximity to the recommended site. The NIMBY problem is unavoidable -- it is someone's backyard, and it is a worrisome neighbor. So this is a good case in terms of which to think creatively about the responsibilities of government for ensuring the public good in the face of risky private activity, and the detailed institutions of regulation and oversight that would work to make wise public outcomes mo...

Supervenience is the view that the properties of some composite entity B are wholly fixed by the properties and relations of the items A of which it is composed ( link , link ). The transparency of glass supervenes upon the properties of the atoms of silicon and oxygen of which it is composed and their arrangement. Can the same be said of a business firm like Xerox when we consider its constituents to be its employees, stakeholders, and other influential actors and their relations and actions? (Call that total field of factors S.) Or is it possible that exactly these actors at exactly the same time could have manifested a corporation with different characteristics? Let's say the organizational properties we are interested in include internal organizational structure, innovativeness, market adaptability, and level of internal trust among employees. And S consists of the specific individuals and their properties and relations that make up the corporation at a given time. Could this s...

Suppose we are willing to take seriously the idea that organizations possess a kind of intentionality -- beliefs, goals, and purposive actions -- and suppose that we believe that the microfoundations of these quasi-intentional states depend on the workings of individual purposive actors within specific sets of relations, incentives, and practices. How does the resulting form of "bureaucratic intelligence" compare with human thought and action? There is a major set of differences between organizational "intelligence" and human intelligence that turn on the unity of human action compared to the fundamental disunity of organizational action. An individual human being gathers a set of beliefs about a situation, reflects on a range of possible actions, and chooses a line of action designed to bring about his/her goals. An organization is disjointed in each of these activities. The belief-setting part of an organization usually consists of multiple separate processes culm...

Where do new ideas, new technologies, and new ways of thinking about the world come from in a modern society? Since World War II the answer to this question has largely been found in research universities. Research universities are doctoral institutions that employ professors who are advanced academic experts in a variety of fields and that expend significant amounts of external funds in support of ongoing research. Given the importance of innovation and new ideas in the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century, it is very important to understand the dynamics of research universities, and to understand factors that make them more or less productive in achieving new knowledge. And, crucially, we need to understand how public policy can enhance the effectiveness of the university research enterprise for the benefit of the whole of society. Jason Owen-Smith's recent Research Universities and the Public Good: Discovery for an Uncertain Future  is a very welcome and insightful co...

We often speak of government as if it has intentions, beliefs, fears, plans, and phobias. This sounds a lot like a mind. But this impression is fundamentally misleading. "Government" is not a conscious entity with a unified apperception of the world and its own intentions. So it is worth teasing out the ways in which government nonetheless arrives at "beliefs", "intentions", and "decisions". Let's first address the question of the mythical unity of government. In brief, government is not one unified thing. Rather, it is an extended network of offices, bureaus, departments, analysts, decision-makers, and authority structures, each of which has its own reticulated internal structure. This has an important consequence. Instead of asking "what is the policy of the United States government towards Africa?", we are driven to ask subordinate questions: what are the policies towards Africa of the State Department, the Department of Defense,...

diagrams: Chernobyl reactor before and after Nuclear fission is one of the world-changing discoveries of the mid-twentieth century. The atomic bomb projects of the United States led to the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, and the hope for limitless electricity brought about the proliferation of a variety of nuclear reactors around the world in the decades following World War II. And, of course, nuclear weapons proliferated to other countries beyond the original circle of atomic powers. Given the enormous energies associated with fission and the dangerous and toxic properties of radioactive components of fission processes, the possibility of a nuclear accident is a particularly frightening one for the modern public. The world has seen the results of several massive nuclear accidents -- Chernobyl and Fukushima in particular -- and the devastating results they have had on human populations and the social and economic wellbeing of the regions in which they occurred. Safety is theref...