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Description
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. Read more
Publisher : Princeton University Press; Revised edition (September 27, 1999)
Language : English
Paperback : 464 pages
ISBN-10 : 0691004129
ISBN-13 : 29
Item Weight : 1.38 pounds
Dimensions : 6.1 x 1.18 x 9.2 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #196,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #23 in Technology Safety & Health #102 in Safety & First Aid (Books) #223 in Social Services & Welfare (Books)
#23 in Technology Safety & Health:
#102 in Safety & First Aid (Books):
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Top Amazon Reviews
This book introduces a theory of complex systems and why they may be more accident prone than non-complex ("linear") systems. Perrow then explores how the theory plays out in multiple industries, which all vary in interesting ways: nuclear power, chemical plants/refineries, air travel, marine transport, mining/dams, and more. I work in high tech (large scale online systems, think Big Tech internet/cloud computing) and the theory described in this book is extremely prescient in anticipating the sort of technical problems we sometimes encounter today -- despite having been written 40 years ago. I wish I had read this years ago, to be honest. My one minor complaint with the book: the 1999 reprint, which includes a pretty hastily assembled and speculative Y2K treatment (written before the fact) features a photo of the Challenger accident on the cover. In fact the Challenger is not a good example of a system accident (it was just a bad component design, plus institutional failure/pressure to keep flying it). A much better example would be a nuclear meltdown (e.g. Chernobyl), which Perrow predicted multiple times; again his text being written in 1982-1983 mainly. Anyhow, the publisher can be forgiven for insufficiently thought-through cover photo selection.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2023 by della
Perrow provides an insightful framework for understanding the complex systems we live with every day and the ways they fail. Unfortunately, he spends his conclusion trying to make policy recommendations that aren't actually well supported by his own framework. I highly recommend nearly all of this book for anyone that will be designing, operating, or criticizing complex systems. Aside from poorly explained comments on nuclear criticality accidents and naval nuclear reactors, the earlier chapters of the book are technically quite sound, and Perrow's framework is a good starting point to think about how to make complex systems as safe and resilient as possible.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2018 by Daniel Curtis
Perrow does an excellent job making complex systems more understandable and why multiple interactions between complex components can cause unforeseen accidents despite the best planned safety features. The topic may seem difficult to understand, but with multiple examples, Perrow makes it seem clear as day. The historical record of certain industries and what they’ve done for protection explain why some dangerous operations have a good safety record, yet other complex operations break down often despite layers of “protection” - the “normal accident”. If you wonder why some companies making “dangerous products” have a good safety record, while other heavily regulated industries have more accidents than expected, then this book is for you.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2022 by Wash your hands
I'm struggling to write a fair review of Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. It's what I sometimes call a "I have a new hammer -- look at all these nails!" book. That is, someone has a new idea and writes a book explaining all the ways it applies. These can be very good books, Plagues and Peoples, Private Truths, Public Lies, and The Strategy of Conflict come to mind. Normal Accidents had the potential to be one of these, and if I'm fair, it probably IS one. The problem, though, is that, although it starts off very well, every successive chapter is weaker than the previous one, and the last three are dreadfully tedious. By the time I emerged from the end of the last, I was yelling to Charles Perrow in my mind (as Biden said to Trump), "Would you just shut up, man?" The temptation, given my state of annoyance with the author, is to nitpick the entire book to death, which would not be fair, because it really is based on a very good idea. That good idea is "normal accident theory" (NAT). It started when Perrow was called to participate in the analysis of the accident at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island (TMI). Experts had previously argued that the chance of a serious nuclear reactor accident was very small. Perrow argued that, contrary to being improbable, it was almost inevitable. Not because of the specific combination of things that went wrong at TMI, but because the potential for such accidents was embedded in the nature of the system at a nuclear reactor. He said in 1984, when Normal Accidents was published, that we would have more TMIs. Since then, by my not-well-informed count, we have had worse accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, so two points for Perrow. Chapter 1 is about TMI. Chapter 2 discusses nuclear power plants more generally. Chapter 3 is the heart of the theory the book presents. In it he describes the characteristics of systems that have "system accidents" or "normal accidents" -- complexity and coupling. The next five chapters deal with accidents in different types of systems, 4. petrochemical plants, 5. air travel, 6. marine shipping, 7. dams, mines, 8. space, weapons, and recombinant DNA. At first this was fascinating to a detail-oriented technical type like me. (YMMV, of course.) It was absorbing to read the technical details of how accidents in these different systems came about. They are all different, yet they are all the same, which is Perrow's point. But the examples become weaker as we go along, because we are venturing into systems to which NAT barely applies, or areas where Perrow doesn't know what he's talking about, either because the information is not available to him (nuclear weapons) or he is poorly informed. (Recombinant DNA, "The system appears to be complex in its interactions and tightly coupled, but I caution the reader that I know even less about it than I do about nuclear weapon systems" -- it shows). Now, I am going to succumb to that temptation to nitpick that I complained of. Feel free to stop reading here. I want to be clear that I am not casting doubt on NAT, but only complaining about the way this book is written. In fact, I'm going (with superhuman restraint -- I hope you appreciate this) to restrict my criticisms to the last three chapters: 9. Living with High-Risk systems. This final chapter contains Perrow's recommendations. He begins by saying, "I have a most modest proposal, but even though modest and, I think, realistic, it is not likely to be followed." This is tantamount to saying he is not going to take his own recommendations seriously. The chapter then devolves into a long, "Why everyone who disagrees with me is wrong" screed. That never goes well. Afterword. Here he explains that Normal Accidents went out of print, but that Princeton University Press offered him the opportunity to publish a new edition in 1999. The Afterword is mostly an update on normal accident theory. As written, it is a terrible missed opportunity. 1984 was almost 40 years ago, and as you read the first nine chapters you will constantly remark to yourself incidents that have happened since to which NAT might apply. Perrow barely discusses those. Instead, it is clear that he has become the Grand Old Man of an academic field, and he reviews the literature like an academic, not a person who is genuinely interested in understanding accidents. (That's a bit unfair, but it's how it felt to me as I read.) Postscript: The Y2K problem. The updated edition was published in 1999, when there was a lot of worry about computer systems failing as the date ticked over to 2000. In this postscript, Perrow seems to have recovered his genuine interest in accidents. In fact, the entire chapter has the feel of him chortling in anticipation of the delicious new disasters that will become available to study. As the world now knows, Y2K was almost a nonevent -- there were minor disruptions only. Folks in information technology would like it to be known that this is not because there was no potential for a disaster, but because they worked their tails off to prevent one, successfully. Fair enough! In summary, Normal Accidents is a good book about an important idea, but it could have been a better book. I'm going to make a recommendation I rarely make: if you read it, read through chapter 8 and skip the final three chapters.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2023 by LA in Dallas