Diane Vaughan

Theorizing Disaster Analogy, historical ethnography, and the Challenger accident

Building explanations from data is an important but usually invisible process behind all published research. Here I reconstruct my theorizing for an historical ethnography of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and the NASA (National Aeronautical and Space Administration) decisions that produced that accident. I show how analogical theorizing, a method that compares similar events or activities across different social settings, leads to more refined and generalizable theoretical explanations. Revealing the utility of mistakes in theorizing, I show how my mistakes uncovered mistakes in the documentary record, converting my analysis to a revisionist account that contradicted the conventional explanation accepted at the time. Retracing how I developed the concepts and theory that explained the case demonstrates the connection between historic political and economic forces, organization structure and processes, and cultural understandings and actions at NASA. Finally, these analytic reflections show how analysis, writing, and theorizing are integrated throughout the research process.

The Trickle-Down Effect: Policy Decisions, Risky Work, and the "Challenger" Tragedy

The Challenger disaster cannot be accounted for by reductionist explanations that direct attention only toward individual actors, nor by theories that focus solely on communication failure or the social psychological dynamics of the infamous eve-of-launch teleconference. The cause of the tragedy was rooted in historic organizational and environmental contingencies that preceded the launch decision. By tracing the connection between top policy decisions and decisions by engineers and managers assigned to do risky work, this analysis contradicts conventional understandings about what happened at NASA. As a consequence, this case contains new lessons for both managers and students of organizations.

The Rôle of the Organization in the Production of Techno-Scientific Knowledge

When scientific and technical work goes on within a formal organization, what effect, if any, does the organizational setting have on the production of facts and artefacts? This question has not yet been thoroughly explored in science and technology studies. Organizations are meso-level structures: located between the macro-level contingencies and the micro-level interactions that are known to affect the interpretive work of scientific and technical experts, organizations also play an important rôle. To encourage discussion about the rôle of organizations in knowledge production processes, I first draw on organization theory to demonstrate the ironic fact that organizations, necessary to produce, coordinate and maintain complex techno-scientific systems, also have irreducible and emergent effects on the way complex information is transmitted, communicated, processed and stored. Then, to illustrate empirically how organizations affect knowledge processes in the workplace, I reconsider data on engineering decisions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), presenting a new interpretation that focuses on the rôle of the organization in knowledge production. In combination, organization theory and the empirical analysis suggest that certain structures, processes and transaction forms are generic across organizational settings, having ramifications for knowledge production by technologists and scientists in a variety of knowledge sites. In conclusion, I frame this discussion within the traditions of science and technology studies, suggesting the integrative, theory-building potential of future research that takes into account formal organizations as contemporary machineries of knowing.

NASA Revisited: Theory, Analogy, and Public Sociology1

This ethnographic account of the rituals of risk and error after NASA’s Columbia accident reveals the mechanisms by which sociological theory traveled across the disciplinary boundary to public and policy domains. The analysis shows that analogy was the instigator of it all, enabled by the social mechanisms of professional legitimacy, conversation, technologies, time, networks, and social support. It demonstrates the work sociologists do when theory travels from professional sociology to nonacademic audiences and what happens to the theory and the sociologist in the process. It reveals the tensions when professional sociology, critical sociology, public sociology, and policy sociology are joined. A study of sociology in the field, it shows how sociologists negotiate the meaning of their work in a nonacademic situation. Thus, this account contributes to research and theory on social boundaries, the diffusion of ideas, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and current debates about public sociology and the role of the sociologist, adding to the sociology of our own work.

Transaction Systems and Unlawful Organizational Behavior

The transaction systems of complex organizations are a critical but understudied element of inter-organizational relations. Transactions between complex organizations are characterized by formalization, intricate and highly specialized processing and recording methods, reliance on trust, and general, rather than specific, monitoring procedures. These characteristics may each facilitate unlawful behavior, or they may combine in ways which systematically produce illegality. When this is the case, the organization may have a criminogenic transaction system.

Criminology and the sociology of organizations

The sociology of organizations offers conceptual tools that can be used bycriminologists. The logic of crossing intra-disciplinary boundaries to borrowconceptual tools rests in the analogical properties of structure and processacross social settings that are fundamental aspects of all social organization.Analogy itself is underrecognized and used as a tool for conceptual thinkingand analysis in sociology. In this article, I give examples of theories andconcepts from the sociology of organizations that can usefully be appliedto substantive criminological problems. Then I compare family violence andcorporate crime as examples of organizational misconduct, foregroundingthe organizational setting in order to examine links between micro-, meso-,and macro-levels of analysis. These two exercises demonstrate thatincorporating organization theory into criminological research can providenew insights in data analysis of substantive problems, build toward generalsociological theory, and toward integrative general criminological theorythat escapes the levels of explanation problem.

The Appliance Repairman A Study of Victim-Responsiveness and Fraud

White-collar crime victimization is a pervasive but little-researched phenomenon in criminology, because of the difficulties, among others, both in proving the occurrence of a crime and in identifying the victims. This case study of complaining victims of appliance repair fraud pro vides an opportunity to examine victim-offender interaction, victim- responsiveness, and impact of victimization. Contrasting the victim sam ple with a comparison sample on relevant variables reveals that the only significant difference between groups is in reporting of past victimiza tion. Both the victim complaint patterns and criminal justice in adequacies revealed by this study must be addressed if programs of social action are to deal effectively with white-collar crime victimization.

Beyond Macro- and Micro-Levels of Analysis, Organizations, and the Cultural Fix

Since the mid 1980s, scholars theorizing about the causes of individual deviance and crime—street crime—have begun to consider the possibility of theoretical integration. Verifying the extensiveness of this activity and simultaneously reifying it, Travis Hirschi called it the “integrationist movement,” identifying proponents as “integrationists.”1 Theoretical integration is an activity that involves the formulation of linkages among different theoretical arguments.2 The fact that theoretical integration has been raised as a strategy worthy of consideration suggests an optimistic view about the status of causal theories of deviance and crime, particularly if we define theory consistent with the hypothetical deductive model of the scientific process: a set of testable, interrelated propositions that explain some activity, event, or circumstance. From this perspective, the call for theoretical integration suggests that individual theories have attained sufficient rigor and explanatory power that refinement by integrating propositions from one with propositions from another is a logical next step. This is not the case.

On the Value of Ethnography: Sociology and Public Policy: A Dialogue

Reproduced below is a conversation and question/answer session about the relationship of ethnography to public policy. The conversation took place in Philadelphia on November 7, 2003. Comments by Jean-Michel Chapoulie follow the dialogue (p. 277).

On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland FirefightersOn the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters, by DesmondMatthew. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 369 pp.

rates at which they will be shipped, and how much they will pay for them. American retailing and Chinese manufacturing have formed a symbiotic relationship that has produced an astonishing flow of goods into the U.S., mostly through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach; combined, these ports form the fifth largest port complex in the world. Below the retailers are the lesser—albeit still powerful—players in the transportation world, such as the steamship lines, the landside transportation companies, and the warehouse and distribution companies. Under pressure from the retailers to cut costs, the steamship lines have responded by consolidating via mergers and takeovers and by building massive containerships to realize economies of scale at sea. On land the biggest transportation change has been “intermodalism,” which refers to the ability to ship cargo from door to door on a single bill of lading. It has been of particular benefit to the railroads, which can load containers (double-stacked) in ports like Los Angeles and Long Beach and ship them all across the country. Not all containers leave these ports by train, however. Those that go by truck often end up in the massive new distribution centers of the Inland Empire of San Bernadino and Riverside counties, where goods are rapidly unpacked, sorted, and repacked for their final destinations. Bonacich and Wilson are less convincing in meeting their second goal, an assessment of the impact of the logistics revolution on workers. They argue that most logistics workers—the significant exception are longshore workers—have experienced a deterioration in their working conditions due to an increase in contingent employment, loss of unions, low wages, and the hiring of Latino workers. There are a couple of problems with this argument. First, it is not clear how much of this deterioration is due to the logistics revolution and how much is the consequence of a more general effort to hold down labor costs—contingent employment, for example, is a common feature of employment across the U.S. economy. Second, the evidence they use is often quite limited. The chapter on warehouse and distribution center workers, for instance, contains very little data about the workers in this industry. Interviews with some of these workers would have been of great help in understanding how they have been affected by the logistics revolution—and might possibly have found that they find working in these centers to be an opportunity rather than a dead-end. These concerns notwithstanding, I would strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in understanding the players and processes that are shaping globalization today.