Disaster by Management: Summaries of Theoretical Themes
Managerialism
Managerialism has its roots in the transition from industrial capitalism to
corporate capitalism, which entailed the growing separation of management from
ownership and the professionalization of management. Managerialism represents
a search for and
application of "scientific" principles of sound management within great
corporations trying to manage multiple plants, offices, markets, and
product-lines.
The (allegedly) efficient private sector corporation was increasingly
contrasted with the public sector. The public sector is assumed to be
shielded from market forces through its dependence on tax revenues and,
therefore, inefficient.
Taxes, moreover, were positioned as a drain on the efficiency of the model
private corporation. The result was increasing pressure to apply managerial
techniques from the private sector to optimize the efficiency of a public
sector agency or institution, so as to reduce the tax burden on the glorified
private sector.
Managerialism in the public sector emphasizes hierarchy and
technology and defines the role of the manager as balancing the socially- and
politically-set goals of the agency with resource constraints. There is an
emphasis on cost-cutting and getting the maximum output for the minimum social
investment, a sort of Wal-Mart model for the delivery of government services.
There is little real reflection on whether this model is even appropriate for
government activity. The presentation
traces out the impact of public sector managerialism on NASA.
Organizational theory:
Organizational theory explores the structuring of individuals in
organizational settings. One of its key ideas is the classification of
organizations into those with mechanistic structures and those with organic
structures.
Mechanistic structures are hierarchical and authoritarian, with
finely differentiated and often repetitive tasks, centralization of
decision-making power and knowledge, and channeling of communication along
vertical
chains of command. In industry, these correspond with and support Fordist
production practices, with massive production of similar or identical pieces
for a stable mass market. Mechanistic organizations are argued to be suited
to external environments characterized by a high degree of certainty and
predictability.
Organic organizations, on the other hand, are associated with
external environments of high uncertainty. There is an emphasis on
flexibility and teamwork among people (even outside the organization) with
very different skills, with lateral communication and a de-emphasis on
hierarchy. Production tends to focus on small batches or customized one-of-a-
kind products and services.
Both NASA and the FBI tend towards the mechanistic end of the continuum, while
operating in milieux and performing tasks that this literature might expect to
elicit organic organization. The FBI, however, has experimented with
decentralization and field office autonomy, a more organic organizational
model, without, however, preventing abuses of authority, and its organization
has moved closer to its original mechanistic structure.
O'Connor's functions of government:
Of relevance to understanding the political and economic uncertainties in the
extragovernmental environment is O'Connor's notion of "accumulation functions"
and "legitimization functions" of governmental agencies. He presented this
dichotomoy in a 1973 book on The Fiscal Crisis of the State.
Accumulation
activities are those which facilitate conditions enabling the profitable
operation of private companies. Examples would include airport and port
operation, the construction and maintenance of transportation systems, State
or municipal operation of utilities, the maintenance of law and order, and,
to a lesser extent, education and workforce training. These functions often
enjoy fairly stable funding, often from independent revenue sources, and are
less vulnerable to the political process.
Legitimization functions, on the
other hand, are those devoted to taking care of the welfare of those
negatively impacted by the free flow of investment and those serving symbolic,
even propagandistic loyalty-building purposes. These might include public
assistance, Social Security, public housing, environmental protection, and, to
a certain extent, education and public safety functions. Legitimization
functions and agencies dominated by them endure more variable funding and
support, depending on the ebb and flow of the political election cycle,
leaving them in a position of having to lobby for their livelihoods.
The FBI, with its law and order function, seems to fall more on the
accumulation side. NASA carries a symbolic freight, which has an optional
quality in the eyes of many involved in the political battles of a given time.
This pushes NASA more toward the legitimization side of the continuum.
Accident theory:
Normal accident theory argues that accidents are "normal" in large, complex
systems, because of unexpected interactions among components as much as from
failure of single components. If these components are tightly coupled in a
reaction or in a sequence, then unexpected failure can well happen far faster
than human beings can grasp and respond to the situation and can easily
cascade across multiple pathways in unexpected ways, triggering ever more
failures.
Countering normal accident theory is high reliability theory, which
dissects case studies of organizations that have long histories safely
operating high consequence technologies. High reliability theory argues that
these case studies share characteristics, such as the formation and
maintenance of an intense "culture of safety." This culture of safety
typically features delegation of responsibility to the levels closest to the
technical operation of the components in question, openness to learning from
accidents and near misses (rather than blame-seeking), redundancy in personnel
handling especially intense and critical tasks, and multiply redundant
fail-safes.
Normal accident theory takes a critical stance toward high reliability theory,
even to the point of predicting that redundant safety mechanisms and
fail-safes can themselves increase the risk of failure through adding to the
complexity and opaqueness of a system. High reliability theorists would point
to the long-term safe performance of certain organizations to argue that
complexity and tight coupling cannot be allowed to induce a "can't do" culture
of safety: Perhaps accidents are normal, but there are lessons to be learned
to make accidents at least less normal.
Until the crash of the Challenger, NASA might have been offered as an example
of a high reliability organization. Would analysis of its technical and
organizational characteristics have detected the departure from the tight
safety culture of a high reliability organization in time to avert the first
of the Shuttle disasters?
Risk perception:
Risk perception has garnered a large literature in and out of geography. A
common theme is the discrepancy between perception and analytically derived
measures of probabilities and consequences. Fairly consistently, people tend
to overestimate the frequency of low probability but dramatic hazards (e.g.,
nuclear power plant accidents or airplane crashes) as compared with expert
estimates. Similarly, they tend to underestimate high probability hazards
that are less dramatically memorable, such as certain lifestyle-mediated
diseases or automobile accidents. While true of lay audiences, the opposite
seems to be true of managers in complex organizations responsible for the
application of risky technology: There is a tendency to normalize anomaly and
an unwillingness to focus on dire consequences that may be glaringly obvious
in investigational hindsight. This is one of the mechanisms cited in normal
accident theory.
Related to this is a finding that people, including managers in complex
technological organizations, often make up their minds about an issue before
being exposed to an adequate array of facts and arguments about it, often
taking the position of a reference group they trust, and then become very
confident in their opinions. Once the pattern gels one way or the other, new
facts and arguments are fit into the framework in a way that further
solidifies it, in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance of entertaining two
mutually exclusive interpretations. Contrary facts are not perceived or are
dismissed.
Risk assessment vs. risk management:
Complicating the resistance to dissonant information is the tension between
risk assessment and risk management. Risk assessment specifies hazards to
humans, generally in terms of the expected probabilities of given types and
magnitudes of damage. Risk management is the development and implementation
of policy to minimize hazard. The distinction, while clear in concept, is
often contentious in application, since each depends on the other. Assessors
need to understand managers' needs and policy preferences for the proper
balance between human safety and other goals; managers need to understand the
results and limitations of assessment and their relevance to management
decision-making and policy formulation.
Further complicating this
communication is the different status each function occupies in an
organization: Risk assessors, as technicians and scientists, are placed below
and answer to managers. If the results of risk assessment do not validate the
mental frameworks that have gelled around a manager, he or she may well not
really hear the assessment message or may actively suppress its dissemination.
Geography
Geography is a tacit agent in organizational disaster. Highly complex
organizations managing highly complex issues and technologies may be spatially
diffuse. This creates a friction of distance within such organizations. This
friction of distance may well be only psychological in an era of extreme
time-space compression: instantaneous communication via e-mail, instant
messaging, and telephones. The lack of quotidian face-to-face contact
nevertheless can raise the psychological inertia to be overcome in initiating
contact with someone removed in space.
Space exerts not only an actual and a psychological friction of distance, but
spatial positionality in an organization is linked with symbolic and political
positionality. Regional centers are subsumed under and answer to
headquarters. Information from regional centers may be thus somehow
discounted in importance. Too, regional centers themselves may compete among
one another with varying success, creating a sort of spatial weighting of
information based on which regional center originated it.
The spatiality of NASA and the FBI and the political and psychological
distantiation it represents come across as implicated accomplices in the
breakdowns of communication that enabled these disasters. While there is
time-space compression in communications technologies, it exerts its influence
through the symbolic and political time-space distantiation of
hierarchicalization in space.
first placed on the web: 04/03/04
last revised: 04/03/04
maintained by C.M. Rodrigue
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