"Normal Accidents contributed key concepts to a set of intellectual developments in the 1980s that revolutionized the conception of safety and risk. It made the case for examining technological failures as the product of highly interacting systems, and highlighted organizational and management factors as the main causes of failures. Technological disasters could no longer be ascribed to isolated equipment malfunction, operator error or acts of God... Perrow concluded that the failure at Three Mile Island was a consequence of the system's immense complexity. Such modern high-risk systems, he realized, were prone to failures however well they were managed. It was inevitable that they would eventually suffer what he termed a 'normal accident'. Therefore, he suggested, we might do better to contemplate a radical redesign, or if that was not possible, to abandon such technology entirely."
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Academics from the United StatesBusiness theorists from the United StatesSociologists from the United StatesPeople from Washington (state)Stanford University faculty
Original Language: English
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Sources
Nick Pidgeon. "In retrospect:Normal accidents". Nature, (Vol 477), September 22, 2011.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Perrow
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Charles Perrow
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