Gene I. Rochlin

Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization

From the Publisher: Voice mail. E-mail. Bar codes. Desktops. Laptops. Networks. The Web. In this exciting book, Gene Rochlin takes a closer look at how these familiar and pervasive productions of computerization have become embedded in all our lives, forcing us to narrow the scope of our choices, our modes of control, and our experiences with the real world. Drawing on fascinating narratives from fields that range from military command, air traffic control, and international fund transfers to library cataloging and supermarket checkouts, Rochlin shows that we are rapidly making irreversible and at times harmful changes in our business, social, and personal lives to comply with the formalities and restrictions of information systems.The threat is not the direct one once framed by the idea of insane robots or runaway mainframes usurping human functions for their own purposes, but the gradual loss of control over hardware, software, and function through networks of interconnection and dependence. What Rochlin calls the computer trap has four parts: the lure, the snare, the costs, and the long-term consequences. The lure is obvious: the promise of ever more powerful and adaptable tools with simpler and more human-centered interfaces. The snare is what usually ensues. Once heavily invested in the use of computers to perform central tasks, organizations and individuals alike are committed to new capacities and potentials, whether they eventually find them rewarding or not. The varied costs include a dependency on the manufacturers of hardware and software and a seemingly pathological scramble to keep up with an incredible rate of sometimes unnecessary technological change. Finally, a lack of redundancy and an incredible speed of response make human intervention or control difficult at best when (and not if) something goes wrong. As Rochlin points out, this is particularly true for those systems whose interconnections and mechanisms are so deeply concealed in the computers that no human being fully understands them.

Informal organizational networking as a crisis- avoidance strategy: US naval flight operations as a case study:

The requirement for maintaining responsiveness and flexibility with a high degree of operational reliability and safety puts considerable demand on any organization. In the case of US Navy flight operations at sea, conditions of extraordinarily tight coupling and high technical complexity, flexible demand and uncertain environment provide more potential sources of crisis and acci dent than there are management personnel or permanent structures to cope with them. This paper discusses the Navys evolved and relatively successful strategy of creating and maintaining a set of informal, evanescent, functional networks whose primary purpose is to anticipate and deflect emerging crises rather than merely react to them.

How to Hunt a Very Reliable Organization

A summary of my long engagement with Todd R. LaPorte as colleague, mentor, and fellow field worker in the study of large, reliability-seeking organizations that manage risk-bearing technologies is used to explore the relationship of our fieldwork approaches and techniques to other ethnographic means of sociological research. In particular, I discuss three organizations that have been at the core of what is generally known as the high reliability organization project: air traffic control; nuclear power plant operations; and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at sea. In retrospect, our fieldwork was as intimate as that characterizing participant observers; yet, because of the complexity and risk involved in the sites of our study, we could only observe, and not participate.

Iran Air Flight 655 and the USS Vincennes

Patrolling the restricted waters of the Persian Gulf was a trying activity for most U.S. warships, designed, armed, and trained as they were for far-ranging “blue water” operations. This was particularly true for the officers and crew of the USS Vincennes. One of the first of the Ticonderoga-class “Aegis” cruisers, the Vincennes is a fast, lightly armored ship—a cruiser built on a large destroyer hull—specially optimized for fleet air defense. Although armed with various surface-to-surface guns and a variety of systems for close-in air defense, her real “main battery” consisted of the Standard SM-2 anti-aircraft missiles stored deep in her magazines.

West Valley: Remnant of the AEC

The events, regulations, and problems leading to the concept, construction, and limited operation of the Nuclear Fuel Service (NFS) reprocessing plant at West Valley, NY are reviewed. The effects of the changing climate of nuclear thinking on this reprocessing operation are emphasized. Changing government regulations relating to fuel reprocessing are discussed chronologically with respect to NFSs plight. The current status of wastes stored at West Valley is described. Some lessons learned from the West Valley operation and their influences on future fuel-reprocessing operations are highlighted. (BLM)

Two‐Thousand‐N: An IT Odyssey

Over the past few years, incidents and accidents that resulted directly from information technology failures have been noticed only by a small circle of analysts. Whatever the outcome when the clock strikes the first second of the year 2000, the Y2K ‘crisis’ has brought to general attention the vulnerabilities and dependencies of large, complex technical systems that depend largely, or in some cases entirely, on computers and networks for their operation. Moreover, the transition has only just begun. Over the next few years, many other industries, markets, bureaus, and regulatory and safety systems will transform their mode of operation to large, integrated systemic dependencies on IT; others will become increasingly dependent upon the reliable performance of other IT systems such as global positioning satellites or the Internet over which they have at best limited control. Where such operations are safety critical, as they are for air traffic control, economically critical, as they are for international financial transactions, individually critical, as they are for hospital and biomedical systems, or, finally, critical for those agencies and institutions whose primary goal is intervention, mitigation, or crisis management, surprises can be rapid, extensive, and interconnected to a degree that will in itself be surprising. This article uses some historical cases to explore the possible range of future crises and contingencies that might ensue.