Every year or two I re-read Vaughan’s work (book and key papers)…and each time all I can say is: oof.
Some extracts:
· “mistake, mishap, and disaster are socially organized and systematically produced by social structures”
· “No extraordinary actions by individuals explain what happened”
· “The cause of disaster was a mistake embedded in the banality of organizational life”
· “production pressures, originating in the environment, become institutionalized in organizations, having nuanced, unacknowledged, pervasive effects on decision making”
· “as long as we see organizational failures as the result of individual actions our strategies for control will be ineffective, and dangerously so”
Essential reading in my view – and the “banality of organizational life” is perhaps among the most beautiful, nuanced, but depressing, expressions in disaster research.
Ref: Vaughan, D. (1996). The Challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA. University of Chicago press.
SafetyInsights.org 
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