Charles Perrow
Biographic Data
| ID | 167326 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Perrow |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Perrow |
| SIGNATURE | PERROW C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1430 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1959 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Organizations and the Production of Systemic Risk
Cracks in the “Regulatory State”
Over the last 30 years, the U.S. states has retreated from its regulatory responsibility over private-sector economic activities. Over the same period, a celebratory literature, mostly in political science, has developed, characterizing the current period as the rise of the regulatory state or regulatory capitalism. The notion of regulation in this literature, however, is a perverse one—one in which regulators mostly advise rather than direct, an…
Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In The Next Catastrophe , he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness. Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their …
Ditching New Orleans
Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction, and Opportunity
Giddens and the Developing Nations Examine Global Warming
Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown
Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociolo…
What’s needed is application, not reconciliation: A response to Shrivastava, Sonpar and Pazzaglia (2009)
Normal accident theory says nothing about the time dimension that triggers human failures and thus is not appropriately applied by Shrivastava et al., in their article. Indeed, the theory focuses upon system aspects rather than human behavior, thus no reconciliation is needed with those that focus upon human behavior, it just more economically explains a subset of accidents
Modeling firms in the global economy
Conservative Radicalism
Disasters Evermore: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
Charles Perrow Disasters Evermore? Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters I HAVE A SIMPLE MESSAGE'. DISASTERS FROM NATURAL, INDUSTRIAL, and technological sources, and from deliberate sources such as terror ism, are inevitable, and increasing. We may prevent some and mitigate some, but we cannot escape them . At present we focus on protecting the targets, or reducing the damage to them or the people involved.…
Racing the Storm: Racial Implications and Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina
Complexity, Catastrophe, and Modularity
The Values of Bureaucracy - Paul Du Gay
Organizational or Executive Failures
Inside the Nuclear Plant's Executive Office
A Personal Note on Normal Accidents
Minding the Machines: Preventing Technological Disasters
Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism
Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies - Updated Edition
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…
An Organizational Analysis of Organizational Theory
Organizations in the twentieth century have cerned with three broad themes: First, the rise of become the most powerful force in industrialized organizations-that is, how did we come to grow societies, but understanding and appreciation of an organizational society and how are organizatheir power has been neglected. field most tions born and how do they grow and die? responsible for this appreciation is organization Second, how do they function, …
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest
Organizing for Environmental Destruction
Organizations are the most intensive and effective environmental destroyers. Organizations in a competitive unregulated market such as the United States and emerging Asian and former Soviet countries are more likely to be destructive because externalizing environmental costs increases profits and competitiveness, but organizational properties encourage destructive practices even in command economies. In the United States, a fully wage-dependent w…
Insurgency of the Powerless: Farm Worker Movements (1946-1972)
Drawing on the perspective developed in recent work by Oberschall (1973), Tilly (1975) and Gamson (1975), we analyze the political process centered around farm worker insurgencies. Comparing the experience of two challenges, we argue that the factors favored in the classical social movement literature fail to account for either the rise or outcome of insurgency. Instead, the important variables pertain to social resources-in our case, sponsorship…
A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations
Complex organizations are conceptualized in terms of their technologies, or the work done on raw materials. Two aspects of technology vary independently: the number of exceptions that must be handled, and the degree to which search is an analyzable or unanalyzable procedure. If there is a large number of exceptions and search is not logical and analytic, the technology is described as nonroutine. Few exceptions and analyzable search procedures de…
Complex organizations: A Critical Essay
The Analysis of Goals in Complex Organizations
An understanding of organizational behavior requires close examination of the goals of the organization reflected in operating policies. To reach a first approximation of operative goals, a scheme is proposed which links technology and growth stages to major task areas-capital, legitimization, skills, and coordination-which predict to power structure and thence to limits and range of operative goals. The major illustration of the utility of the s…
A society of organizations
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
Charles Perrow is famous worldwide for his ideas about normal accidents, the notion that multiple and unexpected failures--catastrophes waiting to happen--are built into our society's complex systems. In The Next Catastrophe , he offers crucial insights into how to make us safer, proposing a bold new way of thinking about disaster preparedness. Perrow argues that rather than laying exclusive emphasis on protecting targets, we should reduce their …
Overboard with Myth and Symbols Organizational Environments: Ritual and Rationality. John W. Meyer , W. Richard Scott , Brian Rowan , Terrence E. Deal
Economic theories of organization
Organizational Prestige: Some Functions and Dysfunctions
An organization may control its dependency upon the environment by acquiring prestige. Prestige is preferably based upon the intrinsic qualities of the product, but this is difficult to promote. Claims to prestige may be supported by using validating groups and indirect indexes of quality, but the former can restrict marketing of prestige-promoting endorsements, and emphasis upon indirect indexes tends to subvert quality. Prestige based upon extr…
Organization for Treatment
Organizations and Clients: Essays in the Sociology of Service
Prosaic Organizational Failure
We use the case of the now-dead Shoreham Nuclear Power Station to pose some questions, and a few answers, about organizational failure. The analysis centers on the symbolism of organizational plans, specifically how organizations use plans to justify increasingly complex systems to themselves and to others. That such plans are based on sparse or nonexistent experience, and that they are often wildly unrealistic, suggests some reasons why high-tec…
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest
The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups
Organizations: Structure and Behavior
Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction, and Opportunity
An Organizational Analysis of Organizational Theory
Organizations in the twentieth century have cerned with three broad themes: First, the rise of become the most powerful force in industrialized organizations-that is, how did we come to grow societies, but understanding and appreciation of an organizational society and how are organizatheir power has been neglected. field most tions born and how do they grow and die? responsible for this appreciation is organization Second, how do they function, …
Normal accident at three Mile Island
Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations
Cracks in the “Regulatory State”
Over the last 30 years, the U.S. states has retreated from its regulatory responsibility over private-sector economic activities. Over the same period, a celebratory literature, mostly in political science, has developed, characterizing the current period as the rise of the regulatory state or regulatory capitalism. The notion of regulation in this literature, however, is a perverse one—one in which regulators mostly advise rather than direct, an…
What’s needed is application, not reconciliation: A response to Shrivastava, Sonpar and Pazzaglia (2009)
Normal accident theory says nothing about the time dimension that triggers human failures and thus is not appropriately applied by Shrivastava et al., in their article. Indeed, the theory focuses upon system aspects rather than human behavior, thus no reconciliation is needed with those that focus upon human behavior, it just more economically explains a subset of accidents
Modeling firms in the global economy
Journaling careers
Disasters Evermore: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
Charles Perrow Disasters Evermore? Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters I HAVE A SIMPLE MESSAGE'. DISASTERS FROM NATURAL, INDUSTRIAL, and technological sources, and from deliberate sources such as terror ism, are inevitable, and increasing. We may prevent some and mitigate some, but we cannot escape them . At present we focus on protecting the targets, or reducing the damage to them or the people involved.…
Reality Adjustment: A Young Institution Settles for Humane Care
Reality Adjustment: A Young Institution Settles for Humane Care Get access Charles Perrow Charles Perrow University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 14, Issue 1, Summer 1966, Pages 69–79, https://doi.org/10.2307/799034 Published: 07 August 2014
Research in a Home Care Program
Research in a Home Care Program Charles Perrow CopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.49.1.34 Published Online: August 29, 2011
The Analysis of Goals in Complex Organizations
An understanding of organizational behavior requires close examination of the goals of the organization reflected in operating policies. To reach a first approximation of operative goals, a scheme is proposed which links technology and growth stages to major task areas-capital, legitimization, skills, and coordination-which predict to power structure and thence to limits and range of operative goals. The major illustration of the utility of the s…
A Polish Factory: A Case Study of Workers' Participation in Decision-making.Jiri Kolaja
Organizational Prestige: Some Functions and Dysfunctions
An organization may control its dependency upon the environment by acquiring prestige. Prestige is preferably based upon the intrinsic qualities of the product, but this is difficult to promote. Claims to prestige may be supported by using validating groups and indirect indexes of quality, but the former can restrict marketing of prestige-promoting endorsements, and emphasis upon indirect indexes tends to subvert quality. Prestige based upon extr…
Structures of Custodial Care: An Anthropological Study of a State Mental Hospital. Richard F. Salisbury
Reality Shock: A New Organization Confronts the Custody-Treatment Dilemma
Reality Shock: A New Organization Confronts The Custody-Treatment Dilemma Get access Charles Perrow Charles Perrow University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 10, Issue 4, Spring 1963, Pages 374–382, https://doi.org/10.2307/799209 Published: 08 August 2014
Life in the Ward.Rose Laub Coser
The Community and Its Hospitals: A Comparative Analysis. Ivan Belknap , John G. Steinle
Organizations: Structure and Behavior
Reality Adjustment: A Young Institution Settles for Humane Care
Reality Adjustment: A Young Institution Settles for Humane Care Get access Charles Perrow Charles Perrow University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 14, Issue 1, Summer 1966, Pages 69–79, https://doi.org/10.2307/799034 Published: 07 August 2014
Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice
Organization for Treatment
A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations
Complex organizations are conceptualized in terms of their technologies, or the work done on raw materials. Two aspects of technology vary independently: the number of exceptions that must be handled, and the degree to which search is an analyzable or unanalyzable procedure. If there is a large number of exceptions and search is not logical and analytic, the technology is described as nonroutine. Few exceptions and analyzable search procedures de…
Organization for Treatment: A Comparative Study of Institutions for Delinquents
Bureaucracy
Organizations and Clients: Essays in the Sociology of Service
The Theory of Organizations: A Sociological Framework.David Silverman
The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups
Organizational analysis: A Sociological View
Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations
Insurgency of the Powerless: Farm Worker Movements (1946-1972)
Drawing on the perspective developed in recent work by Oberschall (1973), Tilly (1975) and Gamson (1975), we analyze the political process centered around farm worker insurgencies. Comparing the experience of two challenges, we argue that the factors favored in the classical social movement literature fail to account for either the rise or outcome of insurgency. Instead, the important variables pertain to social resources-in our case, sponsorship…
Ideological politics
Normal accident at three Mile Island
Not Risk but Power
Journaling careers
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Business (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Economics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)