Acknowledgements 1. Organizational encounters with risk: an introduction Bridget Hutter and Michael Power 2. Organizational rituals of risk and error Diane Vaughan 3. 'Ways of seeing': understandings of risk in organisational settings Bridget Hutter 4. Risk and rules: the 'legalization' of medicine Carol A. Heimer, Juleigh Coleman Petty and Rebecca J. Culyba 5. Organizational responses to risk: the rise of the Chief Risk Officer Michael Power 6. Incentives, risk and accountability in organizations Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak 7. Mathematizing risk: models, arbitrage and crises Donald MacKenzie 8. Interdependencies within an organization Howard Kunreuther and Geoffrey Heal 9. Restoring reason: causal narratives and political culture Sheila Jasanoff Bibliography Index.

Organizational encounters with risk

This book provides a groundbreaking reassessment of the prehistory of Homeric epic. It argues that in the Early Iron Age bilingual poets transmitted to the Greeks a set of narrative traditions closely related to the one found at Bronze-Age Hattusa, the Hittite capital. Key drivers for Near Eastern influence on the developing Homeric tradition were the shared practices of supralocal festivals and venerating divinized ancestors, and a shared interest in creating narratives about a legendary past using a few specific storylines: theogonies, genealogies connecting local polities, long-distance travel, destruction of a famous city because it refuses to release captives, and trying to overcome death when confronted with the loss of a dear companion. Professor Bachvarova concludes by providing a fresh explanation of the origins and significance of the Greco-Anatolian legend of Troy, thereby offering a new solution to the long-debated question of the historicity of the Trojan War.

From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic

O rganizational encounters with risk and error are not restricted to the sensational cases that draw media coverage when mistakes, near misses and accidents become public. They are, instead, a routine and systematic part of daily organizational life that only occasionally become visible to outsiders. Merton was the first to observe that any system of action can generate unexpected consequences that are in contradiction to its goals and objectives (1936, 1940, 1968). Recent research affirms his observation: unanticipated events that deviate from organizational expectations are so typical that they are ‘routine non-conformity’ – a regular by-product of the characteristics of the system itself (Vaughan 1999). The public learns about only the most egregious of these. Because routine non-conformity is a regular system consequence, complex organizations that use or produce risky technologies may have encounters with risk daily. In this chapter, I compare daily encounters with risk for two organizations for which mistakes result in public failures and have high costs: the Federal Aviation Administration's National Air Transportation System (NATS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Space Shuttle Program (SSP). My logic for comparing these two agencies is grounded in two related strands of research. Barry Turner investigated the causes of eighty-five different ‘man-made disasters’. He found an alarming pattern: after a disaster, investigators typically found a history of early-warning signs that were misinterpreted or ignored. A problem that seemed well structured in retrospect was ill structured at the time decisions were being made (Turner 1978; Turner and Pidgeon 1997).

Organizational Encounters with Risk: Organizational rituals of risk and error

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The Ethics of Scientific Research: A Guidebook for Course Development

Environmental peacebuilding represents a paradigm shift from a nexus of environmental scarcity to one of environmental peace. It rests on the assumption that the biophysical environment’s inherent ...

Environmental peacebuilding: Towards a theoretical framework:

The Use of Human Beings in Research

The Role of Trust in Conflict Resolution

As concluding comments to the present book, we would like to suggest that although the contributors provided many different angles to shed light on the nature of trust and distrust and then specifically on the essence of trust, or especially distrust, in the Israeli Jewish--Palestinian relations, one common denominator is found in every contribution: Namely all of them recognize that trust and distrust are sociopsychological concepts. In view of this shared commonality we would like to provide a sociopsychological conceptual framework of trust and distrust as a concluding statement.

Ilai Alon

Papers

The Use of Human Beings in Research

The Role of Trust in Conflict Resolution

Sociopsychological Approach to Trust (or Distrust): Concluding Comments

Al-Ghazālī on Causality@@@Al-Ghazali on Causality

Socrates in mediaeval Arabic literature