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The cover of The Challenger Launch Decision Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

The Challenger Launch Decision Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

Diane Vaughan

Was the Challenger disaster only a technical failure, or did the NASA organization itself help cause it?

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At a glance

Author
Diane Vaughan

Why read it

  • You will understand how worried engineers came to keep approving launches despite worsening danger signs, a pattern the author calls the normalization of deviance
  • You will notice how a culture of production can quietly frame decisions about risk throughout an organization
  • You will question the reverence for technology that turned NASA into a near religious national icon through hard decades

Who it is for

  • A manager whose team keeps tolerating a known risk
  • An engineer pressed to approve something despite doubts
  • A reader of disasters who wants more than a technical answer

Contents

  1. Preface
  2. One: The Eve of the Launch
  3. Two: Learning Culture, Revising History
  4. Three: Risk, Work Group Culture, and The Normalization of Deviance
  5. Four: The Normalization of Deviance, 1981-1984
  6. Five: The Normalization of Deviance, 1985
  7. Six: The Culture of Production
  8. Seven: Structural Secrecy
  9. Eight: The Eve of the Launch Revisited
  10. Nine: Conformity and Tragedy
  11. Ten: Lessons Learned
  12. Appendix A: Cost/Safety Trade-offs? Scrapping the Escape Rockets and the SRB Contract Award Decision
  13. Appendix B: Supporting Charts and Documents
  14. Appdenix C: On Theory Elaboration, Organizations, and Historical Ethnography

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