Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies

Princeton University Press

Write a Review
$21.44 - $45.82
UPC:
9780691004129
Binding:
Paperback
Note:
Used books may not include companion materials/CD/Code etc, items in good condition.We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Publication Date:
9/27/1999
Author:
Charles Perrow
Language:
english
Edition:
Updated edition with a New afterword and a new postscript by the author
Adding to cart… The item has been added

Product Overview


Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk--complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling--this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist we run them.


The first edition fulfilled one reviewer's prediction that it may mark the beginning of accident research. In the new afterword to this edition Perrow reviews the extensive work on the major accidents of the last fifteen years, including Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Challenger disaster. The new postscript probes what the author considers to be the quintessential 'Normal Accident' of our time: the Y2K computer problem.