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Living With High-Risk Conclusions Jan 29, 2004 (69 of 79 found this helpful)
I have been mulling over this review for a while now, and am still undecided on the correct rating to award this book. On the one hand Perrow offers some genuine insight into systems safety, but frequently does not understand the technicalities of the systems (or occasionally their operators) well enough to make informed decisions and recommendations. In more egregious cases he comes to conclusions that are guaranteed to reduce safety (as when he argues that supertankers should be run by committee, and the usefulness of the Captain is no more) or are merely the cherished liberal opinions of an Ivy League sociologist (he teaches at Yale) as when he argues for unilateral nuclear disarmament, government guaranteed income plans, and heroin maintenance (distribution) plans for addicts "to reduce crime." In the case of disarmament, remember this was written during the early 1980s while the Soviet Union was still a huge threat...complete nuclear disarmament would have resulted in fewer US nuclear accidents, but would NOT have made us safer as we would have been totally vulnerable to intentional nuclear attack. He has great personal animosity toward Ronald Reagan, and makes inflammatory statements in the mining section that mining safety regulations would surely be weakened by Reagan, causing many more accidents and deaths. Later in the same section, though, he concludes that mining is inherently dangerous, and no amount of regulation can make it safe. So which is it? Any of this is, at very best, folly, but regardless of political bent (he is a self avowed "leftist liberal") has absolutely no place in a book ostensibly on safety systems. As such I think portions of this book show what is so wrong in American academia today: even genuinely excellent research can be easily spoiled when the conclusions are known before the research is started. This is one of the many reasons that physical scientists scorn the social sciences, and it doesn't have to be this way.
Having said all that there IS a wealth of good information and insight in this book when Perrow sticks to systems and their interactions. The book contains the finest analysis commercially available of the Three Mile Island near-disaster, and his insight about how to improve safety in nuclear plants was timely when the book was written in 1984, though many improvements have been made since then.
Speaking as a commercial airline pilot, I feel his conclusions and observations about aircraft safety were generally true at the time of printing in 1984, but now are miserably out of date. (The same is true of the Air Traffic Control section.) I believe that he generally has a good layman's grasp of aviation, so I am willing to take it as a given that he has a knowledgeable layman's comprehension of the other systems discussed. As an aside, he never gets some of the technicalities quite right. For instance, he constantly uses the term 'coupling' incorrectly in the engineering sense; this is particularly objectionable in the aviation system where it has a very specific meaning to aeronautical engineers and pilots.
The section on maritime accidents and safety is superbly written. Here I am not an expert, but there seems to be a high degree of correlation with the aviation section. His section on "Non Collision Course Collisions" by itself makes this book a worthwhile read. He presents very compelling information and reasoning until the very end of the section, at which point he suggests that since ships are now so big, large ships (especially supertankers) essentially should have no Captain, but should be run by committee. This is an invalid conclusion, and he offers no evidence or substantial argument to support that idea. Clearly, it is an idea hatched in his office and not on a ship (or plane.) There always needs to be a person in a place of ultimate authority in fast moving, dynamic systems, or the potential exists to have crew members begin to work at direct odds with each oth
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Of Lasting Value, Relevant to Today's Technical Maze Jan 27, 2003 (14 of 15 found this helpful)
Edit of 2 April 2007 to add link and better summary.
I read this book when it was assigned in the 1980's as a mainstream text for graduate courses in public policy and public administration, and I still use it. It is relevant, for example, to the matter of whether we should try to use nuclear bombs on Iraq--most Americans do not realize that there has never (ever) been an operational test of a US nuclear missile from a working missle silo. Everything has been tested by the vendors or by operational test authorities that have a proven track record of falsifying test results or making the tests so unrealistic as to be meaningless.
Edit: my long-standing summary of the author's key point: Simple systems have single points of failure that are easy to diagnose and fix. Complex systems have multiple points of failure that interact in unpredictable and often undetectable ways, and are very difficult to diagnose and fix. We live in a constellation of complex systems (and do not practice the precationary principle!).
This book is also relevant to the world of software. As the Y2K panic suggested, the "maze" of software upon which vital national life support systems depend--including financial, power, communications, and transportation software--has become very obscure as well as vulnerable. Had those creating these softwares been more conscious of the warnings and suggestions that the author provides in this book, America as well as other nations would be much less vulnerable to terrorism and other "acts of man" for which our insurance industry has not planned.
I agree with another review who notes that this book is long overdue for a reprint--it should be updated. I recommended it "as is," but believe an updated version would be 20% more valuable.
Edit: this book is still valuable, but the author has given us the following in 2007:
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
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Where are all the catastrophes he talks about? Jun 26, 2002 (15 of 18 found this helpful)
It's a good and interesting theory motivated by a desire to do away with nuclear power. Fine and dandy, but the problem is that while we can tick off a few major disasters: Chernobyl, Bhopal, possibly the intelligence failure leading up to September 11th, the truth is, all his doomsday prophecies have yet to come true. Maybe Perrow is a Cassandra, unlistened to and unappreciated until his prophecies come true. There are a variety of managers who have taken up the task of managing their complex, tightly coupled systems for reliability. Perrow addresses some of them in the afterword to the 2000 edition, but he gives them short shrift. No doubt Perrow touched off a flurry of new research on organizations and this book has, thus, become a classic. But some classics have to be update4d, rethought, and evaluated once again with the searching spotlight of new knowledge. The fact is, at a major weapons lab in the southwest there will be on the order of 1000 fatalities in 1000 years from traffic accidents and only 5 in 1000 years from nuclear related disaster. While traffic movement is complex and tightly coupled, it is probably not a system as he defines it. My suggestion is to read Perrow with Sagan, grasp the underlying theory behind Normal Accident Theory and then read the work of the Berkeley High Reliability Organizations group (Rochlin, LaPorte, Roberts, Weick--at Michigan) etc. THis will give a more well-rounded picture.
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Cool water for hot-headed analysts of complex systems Jul 7, 1998 (15 of 18 found this helpful)
I'm dismayed to discover that 'Normal Accidents' is so difficult to find.
Like all voters, I'm sometimes asked to make choices about the use of potentially devastating technology, despite having no training in engineering and only a sketchy idea of statistical risk analysis. 'Normal Accidents' doesn't reduce my reliance on experts, but it does provide a common language for us to discuss the issues.
Perrow's accident descriptions are masterly, and should disturb anyone who lightly dismisses accidents in complex systems as "simple human error", or assumes that all systems can be made safe by a technological fix. I've used Perrow's complexity / coupling matrix as a tool for thinking about and discussing the risks involved in decisions about many systems in addition to those Perrow actually discusses, not least software systems.
I think this book still has a lot to offer anyone interested in public debate about complex technological issues, and I hope it will be reprinted. A new edition would be even better.
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Insightful perspective on serious industrial accidents. Jul 17, 1998 (12 of 14 found this helpful)
Normal Accidents is the best summary of major industrial accidents in the USA that I have encountered. It is written in a factual and technically complete style that is particularly attractive to anyone with a technical background or interest. I was able to read a borrowed copy from a colleague a few years ago when I was appointed as chairman of the safety committee at a manufacturing facility where workers had potential for exposure to toxic gasses, high voltage, x-radiation, and other more everyday industrial hazards. The author's insight is right on target for achieving a workable understanding of the cause and prevention of disaster events. I wanted to buy copies for all our engineering managers and safety committee members, but the book is out of print. It is my fond hope that the author will write an updated version with analysis of more recent events as well as the well-chosen accidents in the previous edition. For any safety related product or process de! ! signer, this book is a must read! For any technically cognizant reader, this book is a delight to read, even if it is a little scary in its implications. For everyone else, it has some really interesting historical stories.