Todd R. La Porte

The culture of high reliability: quantitative and qualitative assessment aboard nuclear-powered aircraft carriers

Abstract This investigation explores the culture of two nuclear powered aircraft carriers meeting the criteria for high reliability organizations. In the spirit of “triangulation”, use of a questionnaire-cultural assessment was supplemented with officer/expert interpretations and researcher observations of language manifestations of culture (e.g., stories, phrases), rites and ceremonials. Results indicate a different mix of cultural dimensions in these organizations than are usually found in other organizations and highlights some paradoxes. Future research directions are suggested.

Organized social complexity : challenge to politics and policy

One striking feature of modern political and social development has been the construction of social systems encompassing more and more groups. The increase in social complexity, the authors of this volume contend, has reached a point where accepted concepts fail to describe social and political phenomena adequately. The studies in this book reevaluate traditional assumptions. Part One defines organized social complexity and discusses the effects of technological change. Part Two assesses national planning and systems analysis, approaches supposed to provide direct control over social matters. Part Three describes methodological aspects and research applications, and Part Four provides retrospective and prospective views of theories on social complexity.Originally published in 1975.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Conditions of Strain and Accommodation in Industrial Research Organizations

This paper reports on a study conducted in an industrial research laboratory, which examines the sources of strain that might be expected between scientists and managers. It further examines some of the mechanisms that appear to reduce the development of these sources of strain. Of seven hypothesized sources of strain, only two were evident. The absence of other sources of strain seemed to be due to separation of major functional roles within the organization, similar attitudes and backgrounds of scientists and managers, and mechanisms neutralizing the restraining effects of external demands placed upon the organization. Two general hypotheses conclude the paper. First, managerial dependence upon scientists leads to a modification of traditional bureaucratic devices in operating large research organizations. Second, administrative and managerial structure acts as a filter of organzational uncertainty, enabling the scientist to work in an apparently stable organizational world, less disruptive than it appears from a managerial perspective. Todd R. La Porte is visiting assistant professor of political science at Stanf ord University.

Theoretical and operational challenges of “high-reliability organizations”: air-traffic control and aircraft carriers

This is an empirical and theoretical examination of high reliability organizations. The empirical referents are the U.S. Navys nuclear aircraft carriers and the air traffic control system of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Three modes of organizational behavior are observed ranging from routine or bureaucratic to high-tempo to emergency. Each mode has distinctive authority patterns, communications pathways and leadership perspectives. Since 1984, an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Berkeley has been involved in making observations of and theorizing about “high reliability organizations” (HROs), which operate technical systems that are very beneficial, costly, and hazardous. Major operational errors in these organizations are likely to produce catastrophic consequences; therefore, HROs take on the dual goals of sustaining delivery at maximum capacity and operating in nearly error-free fashion. They are so effective that the probability of serious error is very low. Other kinds of organizat...

Public attitudes toward present and future technologies : satisfactions and apprehensions

During the past thirty years, the United States has witnessed the emergence of massively complex organizations bent on technological accomplishments touching the lives of virtually everyone. The results have been mixed. Remarkable achievements have been won, the direct impacts of which have been astonishing; yet as the magnitude of technologys long-term effects is recognized, there grows an increasing uneasiness about the social, political, and environmental consequences of unbridled technical development. Some observers have sensed this paradox in technology as a social force, and have eloquently challenged the tendency to accept new

Diffusion and Discontinuity in Science, Technology and Public Affairs: Results of A Search in the Field

18. This view, which began to gather momentum during World War 11, is now almost universally held in highly industrialized societies and in underdeveloped countries which seek to modernize. The literature which supports this argument is now massive; typical of such thinking in the United States are: Bush, Science, The Endless Frontier (Washington, D.C.: The National Science Foundation, 1945, 1960 reprint); House Committee on Select Research, Hearing, Science Research and Development Programs, and House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Hearings, Government and Science, 88th Congress, first and second sessions, 1963-64. Federal Support of Basic Research in Insrirurions of Higher Learning (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1964); Daedulus. XCI (Spring, 1962) contains a series of stimulating essays on the theme “Science and Technology in Contemporary Society.” A perusal of the content and editorials for the last decade of influential broad gaged science journals, like Science, also support this generalization. 19. Science and the Modern World, (Mentor edn.; New York: New American Library, 1958) p. 17. Pascal is a notable exception.

Shouldering Risks: The Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power IndustryPerinConstance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 378 pp.

Shouldering Risks provides a window into a key facet of the culture of U.S. nuclear power operations—an insistence on a tightly controlled technical and procedural world of producing electricity by this means—and some of the dynamics, perceptions, and norms that accompany it. Constance Perin’s study is a penetrating and worrisome analysis of life in several nuclear-powered electricity production stations similar to those on which a number of industrial societies continue to depend. The book searches out the perceptual views and informal norms that have arisen among those technically trained, engineering-oriented operators who bear the actual burden of keeping us safe, “first operators,” so to say, in the face of overriding institutional (read executive, regulatory, and congressional) pressures to keep production timely while reducing costs.