The Dark Side of Organizations
Mistake, Misconduct, and Disaster
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2297384 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Diane Vaughan (0000-0002-4616-7995, Boston College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 271-305 |
| Publication date | 1999-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Annual Review of Sociology (BOOK_SERIES) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0360-0572 • E-ISSN: 1545-2115 |
| Publisher | Annual Reviews (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1146/annurev.soc.25.1.271 |
| OpenAlex | W2105251708 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 243 |
| References cited | 147 |
In keeping with traditional sociological concerns about order and disorder, this essay addresses the dark side of organizations. To build a theoretical basis for the dark side as an integrated field of study, I review four literatures in order to make core ideas of each available to specialists in the others. Using a Simmelian-based case comparison method of analogical theorizing, I first consider sociological constructs that identify both the generic social form and the generic origin of routine nonconformity: how things go wrong in socially organized settings. Then I examine three types of routine nonconformity with adverse outcomes that harm the public: mistake, misconduct, and disaster produced in and by organizations. Searching for analogies and differences, I find that in common, routine nonconformity, mistake, misconduct, and disaster are systematically produced by the interconnection between environment, organizations, cognition, and choice. These patterns amplify what is known about social structure and have implications for theory, research, and policy
Business · Criminology · Great Rift · Harm · Liability · Misconduct · Mistake · Nonconformity · Order (exchange · Political science · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Engineering · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
Fixing the Blame
The Perfect Solution
A Figure of Merit
Ethical Problems and Genetics Practice
Organizational Myopia
Violence from Above, Violence from Below
Peopling Organizations
Organizational Deviance
Leniency Policies in the Prosecution of Economic Crimes and Corruption
Transforming Justice Responses to Non-Recent Institutional Abuses
Working Communities and the Victorian-American Company Town
Why “Good” Firms do Bad Things
Organizations Gone Wild
Stakeholder Engagement
Ethical Decision Making
Whatever It Takes to Win
The Social Roots of Suicide
The Rationalization of Miracles
(Dis)engaged and Unsupported
The Grey Zone of Stakeholder Engagement
Do Rivals Matter? An Examination of a Competitor CEO’s Award-Winning Event and Corporate Financial Misconduct
Harnessing crisis for innovation
Socioenvironmental Injustice across the Global Divide
Beyond the Bribe
Bridging systems
Mapping research on corporate misconduct in banking
Corporate offending in Dutch inland shipping
Corruption as state -corporate crime
Accident, scandal, disaster
Examining corporate/organisational crime and labour exploitation in relation to a ‘Criminology of work’
The organizational reasons for wrongdoing. The case of Italy’s Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM)
Organizational life-cycle analysis of corporate offending
The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA)
The Banality of Organizational Wrongdoing
Sexual Boundary Violations
Turning the Wheels of Justice
Understanding Fraud in the Not-For-Profit Sector
Business and Human Rights
Causal and Corrective Organisational Culture
An Organizational Capacity for Trustworthiness
The bright side and the dark side of top management support in Digital Transformaion –A hermeneutical reading
Corporate delinquency and corporate sanctions
Deutsche Waffenexporte nach Mexiko. Heckler & Koch – ein Fall organisationaler Devianz
Where Is All the Deviance? Liminal Prescribing and the Social Networks Underlying the Prescription Drug Crisis
Accidentology
Diving deep into the dark side
Curating the digital space
The making of a Swedish strategy
Asymmetry by Design? Identity Obfuscation, Reputational Pressure, and Consumer Predation in U.S. For-Profit Higher Education
'When you smell smoke…'
Minimising dietary risk
Rules don’t apply
The need for fresh blood
Organizing Against Multinational Corporate Power In Cancer Alley
Environmental Hazard and Institutional Betrayal
Perspektiven der Organisationssoziologie
Schlüsselwerke der Organisationsforschung
Choosing White-Collar Crime
Quando perseverare è diabolico
Employing the arts for knowledge production and translation
More Than What Meets the Eye
The Origins of the Food Desert
Drugs, Sweat, and Gears
Pathways to Corruption
Gift-Giving, Disreputable Exchange, and the Management of Donations in a Police Department
Social networks and loss of capital
Accumulating Trouble
Social Disorder as a Social Good
Disinformation Society, communication and cosmopolitan democracy
Doing Business in Zones of Legal Risk
A problem shared…? Teamwork, autonomy and error in assisted conception
The Impact of Recurring Natural Disasters on Chronic Poverty
Pachukanis, Vaughan e a violação de normas jurídicas trabalhistas
Cultural Capture Among Regulators
Divergent evolution of newborn screening
Expuestos y confundidos. Un relato etnográfico sobre sufrimiento ambiental
Long-term Care Workers and Bureaucracy the Occupational Ritualization of Maltreatment in Nursing Homes and Recommended Policies
How misconduct in business contributes to understanding the supply side of corruption in international business
Is There a Temporal Relationship between Covid-19 Infections among Prison Staff, Incarcerated Persons and the Larger Community in the United States
Teaching Theory Analogically
Studying and Teaching White‐Collar Crime
Facing the Unexpected
When disaster management agencies create disaster risk
Learning to manage the unexpected
Crisis management in high-reliability organizations
Systems on the edge
Pour un usage heuristique de la notion de faute. Enquêtes sur la trame morale du travail
Distributive justice, corruption, and entrepreneurial behavior
Embracing the “fail fast and learn fast” mindset
Disaster (continued)
Healthcare quality and safety
Using the Theory of Reasoned Action to Predict Organizational Misbehavior
Using the Theory of Reasoned Action to Predict Organizational Misbehavior
Genocide, Mass Atrocity, and Theories of Crime
Organizational crime and corruption in Brazil a case study of the “Operation Carwash” court records
Organization and organizationality of corruption
The Social Psychology of Corruption
Criminal justice system responses to intimate partner violence
Pol Pot, alias Brother Number One
Cumulative disruptions
Sensemaking in organizations
Power and the Structure of Society
Organizations, uncertainties, and risk
Economic Action and Social Structure
The Manufacture of Knowledge
Order Without Design
Making Gray Gold
Networks of Power
Human Error
Manufacturing Consent
The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis
Beyond Caring
On Being Sane in Insane Places
Learning from Samples of One or Fewer
The Vulnerable System
Acquiring Organizational Legitimacy Through Illegitimate Actions
Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability
The “Criminology of the Corporation” and Regulatory Enforcement Strategies
The TEA Set
Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes
Essence of Decision
The logic of images in international relations.
Tva and the Grass Roots
The Limits of Safety
Handbook of Organizations (RLE
The Development of Large Technical Systems
The Phantom Capitalists
Social Structure and Anomie
How Do We Treat Technical Uncertainty in Systems Failure? The Case of the Space Shuttle Challenger 1
Stealing into Print
Social structure and organizations
Big Money Crime
Life and Death at Work
Acceptable Risk
The Bureaucratic Phenomenon
Economic Action and Social Structure
Invisible elbow
The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts
Unruly Technology
The Perils of Proliferation
The reasonable choice of disaster ‐ the shooting down of the Libyan airliner on 21 February 1973
The "Logic" of Organizational Irrationality
There is more than One Way to be Redundant
Predicting dangerousness
Avoidable and Unavoidable Mistakes in Child Protection Work
Vocabularies of realism in professional socialization
The National Collegiate Athletic Association
Organizational Offending and Neoclassical Criminology
Gender and Varieties of White‐collar Crime
Notes on the Criminogenic Hypothesis
The constitution of society
The Sociology of Georg Simmel
Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap
Crime and Punishment in the Factory
Collaring the Crime, not the Criminal
Social Structure and Anomie
Experiment and illusion in reproductive medicine
Operating as Experimenting
Aligning Actions
The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence
The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action
The Social Organization of Conspiracy
The complexity of ignorance
The Social Fabric at Risk
Managing medical mistakes
Does the current use of junior doctors in the United Kingdom affect the quality of medical care
The Place of the 'Core-Set' in Modern Science
Rational Choice, Situated Action, and the Social Control of Organizations
Automakers and Dealers
Prosaic Organizational Failure
How Organizations Can Overbalance
The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis
Bureaucratic Structure and Personality
Chance in Human Affairs
Rethinking the State
The Space between Laws
Transaction Systems and Unlawful Organizational Behavior
The Micro-Politics of Trouble
Mistakes at Work' the Social Organization of Error in Building Construction Work
Normal Crimes
Occupational Structure and Criminal Behavior
Sociality with Objects
Deviance of Organizational Subunits
Accounting for Error
The Legal Environments of Organizations
Culture and Cognition
Social Structure, Psychology, and the Estimation of Risk
Foi Por Acaso
The Management and Dynamics of Anomalies in Scientific Work
Organizational Crime
Toward an Integrated Theory of White-Collar Crime
Institutionalized Organizations
Psychiatry and Suicide
White-Collar Crime and Social Structure
Corporate concealment of tobacco hazards
Politics as art
A society of organizations
| Unique citing works | 243 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 8,68 |
| Citation span | 1998 - 2026 (29) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 240 |