|
The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA
|
| List Price: | $25.00 |
| Price: | $16.50 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
61 new or used available from $9.17
Average customer review:
Product Description
Journalists and investigators have historically cited production problems and managerial wrong-doing as the reasons behind the disaster. The Presidential Commission uncovered a flawed decision-making process at the space agency as well, citing a well-documented history of problems with the O-ring and a dramatic last-minute protest by engineers over the Solid Rocket Boosters as evidence of managerial neglect.
Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them.
No safety rules were broken. No single individual was at fault. Instead, the cause of the disaster is a story not of evil but of the banality of organizational life. This powerful work explains why the Challenger tragedy must be reexamined and offers an unexpected warning about the hidden hazards of living in this technological age.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #95826 in Books
- Published on: 1997-04-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 592 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 is usually ascribed to NASA's decision to accept a safety risk to meet a launch schedule. Vaughan, a professor of sociology at Boston College, argues instead that the disaster's roots are to be found in the nature of institutional life. Organizations develop cultural beliefs that shape action and outcome, she notes. NASA's institutional history and group dynamics reflected a perception of competition for scarce resources, which fostered a structure that accepted risk-taking and corner-cutting as norms that shaped decision-making. Small, seemingly harmless modifications to technical and procedural standards collectively propelled the space agency toward disaster even though no specific rules were broken. While Vaughan's complex presentation will daunt general readers, her conclusion that the "normalization of deviance" builds error into all human systems is as compelling as it is pessimistic.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Scientific American
Vaughan gives us a rare view into the working level realities of NASA. . . . the cumulative force of her argument and evidence is compelling.
From Booklist
Had Margaret Mead studied the NASAns instead of the Samoans, this anthropological story of the shuttle catastrophe might have resulted. We see the bureaucratic culture that shaped the behavior of the rocket scientists: they launched Challenger expecting some damage to the now infamous O-rings. How they reached that position of tempting fate infuses Vaughan's account. Making arguable constructions about the engineering mentality and group-think, Vaughan focuses on the fateful teleconference the night before the launch, in which executives of the rocket manufacturer first resisted then caved into NASA's pressure to launch. For exerting that pressure, the space agency's managers were pilloried, but personalizing the blame, Vaughan believes, ignores the acculturated rules they followed--which emanated from the political and funding compromises that created the shuttle design. Though Vaughan's scholastic diction acts as narrative speed bumps, her sociological interpretation helps explain the seemingly inexplicable. This complements the dramatic and popular orientation of No Downlink, by Claus Jensen . Gilbert Taylor
Customer Reviews
Fascinating account, tortured writing
Penetrating account of the organizational causes of the Challenger disaster. The author shows that the engineering mistake that led to the disaster was not the result of intentional wrongdoing ("amoral calculator" thesis = managers overruling engineers due to economic and/or political pressures) but that quite on the contrary that the NASA and contractor teams played by the rulebook to a fault and that the mistake was "systematic and socially organized". A must read for everybody interested in organizational dynamics or in how to manage risk in the development of technological innovations.
Given the fascinating subject matter and revisionist thesis it's a pity that the writing is very uneven. Most of the "thick description" of the decisions around the booster joint from the early design days to the post-mortem by the Presidential Commission is quite readable. This core of the text, however, is embedded in an unbearably repetitive and plodding overall narrative flow (the account could probably be reduced in length by 50%) which in places degenerates into (sociological?) opaque language. Taking a cue from the author's concept of "structural secrecy" (things are hidden not on purpose but due to organizational compartmentalization), the argument of the book loses a lot of its force due to the undisciplined way of telling it; the author could profit from a strong editor.
Who would have thought....
Who would have thought that the most cognizant explanation of the Challenger accident would be written from an industrial psychology perspective? I've worked for NASA contractors for 24 years and have dealt with all of the types of various reviews and "overhead chart" engineering and management discussions and telecons she studied. I read this book when it first came out and have referred others to it as one of the best texts on management, technical decision making, and quality assurance that I can think of. Years of education led me to think that I was a "professional" but, as Ms Vaughn so eloquently demonstrates, there is no real aerospace engineering profession in the context of the NASA/Industry partnership.
Reliability/Maintenance/Refinery Engineering Application
I started reading this book to improve my Root Cause Failure Analysis skills after hearing that it covers, in fine detail, a failure that cost the lives of 7 astronauts and destroyed a multi-billion dollar asset. We are first presented with the popular media viewpoint that describes how performance-driven NASA administrators aggressively pursued production, political, and economic goals at the expense of personal safety. How a mechanical flaw formally designated as a potentially catastrophic anomaly by NASA and Thiokol engineers became a normal flight risk on the basis of previous good launches. How a last minute plea from subject matter experts to halt the countdown on an uncommonly cold day in January 1986 was ignored by engineering managers on the decision chain so the launch schedule would not be compromised.
I remember an early feeling of relief in knowing that while similar performance, production, and scheduling pressures exist in my career, the attitudes that were mostly at fault for the Challenger incident are absent from my refinery and violate all 10 of my parent company's business principles starting with #1 (conduct all business lawfully and with integrity).
The author then proceeds to shatter every element of this popular emotional impression by presenting a credible account of the failure based on public record. This is an important point because unlike with Enron's collapse, there is no shredding of pertinent documents behind the Challenger incident. And it is this matter of public record that can benefit anyone having reliability or production engineering responsibilities within a refinery. Here we find evidence that NASA's best friend - a reliable system built to assure the utmost safety in engineering - was to blame for the tragedy. A system that encourages the challenging of engineering data to validate its meaning. A system that prioritizes safety above any other initiative. A system that requires operation within specified safety limits in order to function. A system that requires vendor/customer interaction. A system with multiple departments, requiring effective communication between each.
I soon realized that the book that I was reading was not a book about a tragic point in American history, but a book about managing risks we routinely encounter in a refinery, using the Challenger incident as the case history to relate them to. Like so many case histories in industry, we benefit by understanding what went wrong and taking proactive measures to prevent against it from happening again.
If I owned this refinery and someone came to me saying, "Hey, I'd really like to work here" I would send him or her off with a copy of this book. If that person returned still interested, chances are he or she would get the job.
