Abstract
Success in large-scale projects demands useful information flow. The quality of information available strongly affects the quality of the decisions systems can make. When key items of information are missing, faulty and even disastrous decisions may result. Testimony before the Rogers Commission on events surrounding the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger underline the damage that missing information can cause. Yet major information failures are seldom accidental. Rather, they reflect basic strategies used by organizations to process the events around and within them. The organization’s structure and its philosophy of management are both vital determinants of how information in it will be treated.
Keywords
- Information Flow
- Organizational Design
- Organization Science
- Tennessee Valley Authority
- Information Failure
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Argyris, Chris. (1965). Organization and Innovation. Homewood IL: Dorsey Press. (See also Interpersonal Barriers to Decision-Making. Harvard Business Review volume On Management. New York: Harper and Row, 1975, and Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.)
Argyris, Chris, Robert Putnam, and Diana McLain Smith. (1985). Action Science: Concepts, Methods, and Skills for Research and Intervention. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Barley, S. (1969). Aircrash Detective: An International Report on the Quest for Air Safety. London: Hamish Hamilton. (Very good popular treatment by a comprehensive journalist. As a layman, I found this a useful introduction to the subject. For a more sophisticated introduction by a former Chief Inspector, see William H. Tench (1985), Safety Is No Accident. London: Collins.)
Barzun, Jacques and Henry Graff. (1977). The Modern Researcher. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Beaty, D. (1969). The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents. New York: Stein and Day. (Also see Jane E. Brody. (1980). ‘Human Factor’ in Plane Crashes Is Facing More Intense Scrutiny. New York Times, June 23, pp. 1, 18.)
Blakeslee, Sandra. (1986). Feynman’s Findings: They Fooled Themselves. New York Times, June 11, p. 16.
Brown, Sir Vernon. (1966). The Story of Air Accident Investigation by a Onetime Inspector. Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 70, pp. 243–247.
Burns, Tom and G.M. Stalker. (1961). The Management of Innovation. London: Tavistock.
Carroll, V., Loren Jenkins, and Janet Huck. (1977). Collision Course. Newsweek, April 7, pp. 48-55. (For human factors aspects of this accident, see J. Reason and K.Mycielska. (1982). Absent Minded? The Psychology of Mental Lapses and Everyday Errors. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, pp. 210–217.)
Cockpit Resource Management (1986). A Training Course for Group Problem-Solving. CRM (P.O. Box 1985, Austin, Texas 78767) originated as a joint venture between United Airlines and Scientific Methods, Inc. (the Blake/Mouton “managerial grid” organization). It grew out of a collaboration between the two organizations to improve the ability of United’s flight deck personnel to cope with operational problems. CRM trains flight deck personnel to interact in a more generative way, so that the entire cognitive resources of flight deck personnel are brought to bear on problems. According to the organization’s publicity, some 5,000 persons have been trained using their methods. The organization has recently begun consultation with the nuclear power industry, according to William Taggart of CRM. See also Also see Douglas B. Feaver. (1982), pp. 1,6,7. and Walter J. Boyne. Phantom in Combat. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1985, p. 72.
Cooper, George E., Maurice D. White, and John K. Lauber. (1979). Resource management on the Flight Deck. Proceedings of a NASA/Industry Workshop. Moffett Field, CA: Ames Research Center.
Dalton, Melville. (1959). Men Who Manage. New York: John Wiley.
Douglas, John H. New computer architectures tackle bottleneck. High Technology, June, pp. 71-78.
Emery, Fred and Eric, Trist. The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments. Human Relations, 18, pp. 21–32.
Easterbrook, Gregg. (1984). Why Divad wouldn’t die. Washington Monthly, November.
Fallows, James. (1981). National Defense. New York: Random House, pp. 76–95. (Also see Edward C. Ezell. The Great Rifle Controversy. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, pp. 162-228.
Feaver, D. B. (1982). Pilots learn to handle crises — and themselves. Washington Post, September 12, pp. 1,6,7. (Also see: G. E. Cooper, M. D. White, and J. K. Lauber. Resourcement Management on the Flight Deck. Proceedings of a NASA/Industry Workshop. Moffett Field, CA: NASA/Ames Research Center, 1979. Write: Chief, Aeronautical Human Factors Research Office, Mail Stop 239-21, NASA-Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035.).
Fialka, John J. (1985). Weapon of choice. Wall Street Journal, February 15, pp. 1, 30. (I am currently working on a case study of this innovation and its social context.).
Fitzgerald A. Ernest. (1972). The High Priests of Waste. New York: Norton.
Follett, M.P. (1941). The giving of orders. In H. C. Metcalf and L. Urwick (eds). Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mark Parker Follet. New York: Harper and Row, pp. 50–70. (Like John Leitch, Follet was a management thinker largely ahead of her time.)
Gilman, Hank. (1986). J. C. Penney decentralizes its purchasing. Wall Street Journal, May 8, p. 6.
Foushee, H. Clayton. (1982). The role of communications, socio-psychological, and personality factors in the maintenance of crew coordination. Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, 53(11), pp. 1062–1066.
Friedkin, D. S. (1986). Letter, New York Times, March 9. (The engineer in question was John C. Houbolt, at that time Assistant Chief of the Dynamic Loads Division at Langley Research Center. Friedkin’s letter gives only the barest clue to Houbolt’s long and arduous fight to make himself heard in NASA. But it is a credit to the organization that he could make himself heard, in spite of initial rejection.
James, Grimwood and Loyd Swenson. (1979). Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft. Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, pp. 61–86.
Friedmann, G. (1955). Industrial Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Greve, Frank. (1982). Navy duping itself, U.S., on strengths, experts say. Detroit Free Press, May 31, pp. 1,2.
Hayes, R. H. (1986). Why strategic planning goes awry. New York Times, April 20, Business Section, p. 2.
Hirschhorn, Larry. (1985). Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Post-Industrial Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Chapter 7).
Janis, I. (1972). Victims of Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Johnson, Clarence “Kelly” with Maggie Smith. (1985). Kelly — More Than My Share of It All. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. (See particularly chapter 16)
Jordan, N. (1968). Training information-processing decision-making man-machine systems, in Jordan, N. Themes in Speculative Psychology. London: Tavistock, pp. 164–191. (This paper relates some aspects of the Systems Research Laboratory experiments on radar operator team training.)
Katz, Amrom. (1966). Some Notes on the History of Aerial Reconnaissance (Part I). P-3310 Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, p. 4.
Kraft, Joseph. (1980). Annals of industry: The downsizing decision. New Yorker, May 5.
Leitch, John. (1919). Man to Man: The Story of Industrial Democracy. New York: B.C. Forbes, p. 154. (See also Leitch, John. (1919). The background of industrial democracy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 85, September, pp. 203-213.)
Leslie, S. (1983). Boss Kettering: Wizard of General Motors. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lovins, Amory and Susan Lovins. (1982). Brittle Power. Andover, MA: Brick House.
MacGregor, Douglas. (1958). The Significance of Scanlon’s Contribution. In F.G. Lesieur (ed). The Scanlon Plan: A Frontier in Labor-Management Cooperation. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 10.
McKean, K. (1986). They fly in the face of danger. Discover, April, pp. 48-58.
Menard, H. (1971). Science: Growth and Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Miles, Raymond E. and Charles C. Snow. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process. New York: McGraw-Hill. (See pp. 31-48).
Morison, Elting. (1966). Gunfire at sea. in E. Morison. Men, Machines, and Modern Times. Cambridge: MIT Press. (Also see Peter Padfield. Aim Straight: A Biography of Admiral Sir Percy Scott. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966.)
Mosteller, Frederick. (1981). Innovation and evaluation. Science, 211, pp. 881–886.
Newton, E. (1964). The investigation of aircraft accidents with particular reference to those caused by mechanical failure: their diagnosis, and the lessons learnt from them. Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 68, pp. 156–164.
Nelson, Daniel. (1980). Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Nystrom, Paul and William Starbuck (eds). (1982). The Handbook of Organizational Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O’Connor, Colleen and Lynda Wright. (1986). Troubled times for the TVA. Newsweek, January 27, pp. 23-24.
Ouchi, William G. and Alan L. Wilkins. (1985). Corporate culture. Annual Reviews of Sociology. pp. 457-483.
Padfield, P. (1966). Aim Straight: A Bibliography of Admiral Sir Percy Scott. London: Hodder and Stroughton. p. 136.
Perrow, C. (1964). Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books.
Peters, Thomas and Robert Waterman. (1982). In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. New York: Warner Books.
Pinchot, G.III. (1985). Entrepreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur. New York: Harper and Row.
Sanger, D. (1986). Engineers say they were punished for their testimony about shuttle. New York Times, May 11 p. 17. (Both were soon after reinstated, in the wake of negative publicity.).
Saxenian, A. (1985). Silicon valley and route 128: regional prototypes or historical exceptions. In M. Castells, (ed). High Technology, Space, and Society. Beverly Hills: Sage, pp. 81–105. (See also Dirk Hanson. (1982). The New Achemists: Silicon Valley and the Microelectronics Revolution, Boston: Little, Brown.)
Schon, D. A. (1971). Beyond the Stable State. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 31–60.
Selznick, Philip. (1952). The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Shiels, Merrill et al. (1979). How safe? Newsweek, June 11, pp. 34-43.
Smith, R. Jeffrey. (1985). Pentagon decision-making comes under fire. Science, 227 (4 January), pp. 32,33.
Stein, L. I. (1967). The doctor-nurse game. Archives of General Psychiatry, 16, pp. 699–703. (Similar problems surround the medical use of high-technology devices like computed tomography scanners. See Stephen R. Barley, Technology as an occasion for structuring: evidence from observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31(1), March 1986, pp. 78-108.)
Strauch, R. (1971). The Operational Assessment of Risk: A Case Study of the Pueblo Mission. Rand R-691-PR, Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, March.
Tarkov, John. (1966). A disaster in the making. American Heritage of Invention and Technology, 1(3), pp. 10–17.
Thompson, Mark. (1986). NASA inflated shuttle safety. Detroit Free Press, June 1, pp. 1,8A.
Thompson, Paul. (1978). The Voice of the Past: Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Trankell, Arne. (1972). The Reliability of Evidence. Stockholm: Beckmans.
Trist, E. (1981). The Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems: A Conceptual Framework and an Action Research Program. An Occasional Paper of the Ontario Quality of Working Life Center, Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Labour.
UPI. (1986). NASA investigates alleged document shredding. UPI Reports, May 16.
Vaill, Peter. (1978). Toward a behavioral description of high performance systems. in McCall, M. and M. Lombardo (eds). Leadership: Where Else Can We Go? Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Weber, Max. (1978). Bureaucracy. in H. Gerth and C.W. Mills. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 196–244.
Welchman, Gordon. (1982). The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Westrum, Ron. (1982). Social intelligence about hidden events: its implications for scientific research and social policy. Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 3(3), pp. 381–400.
Westrum, Ron. (1985). Calculative and generative rationality. Social Psychology of Science. Newsletter. March. (It is gratifying to see that several colleagues have used them since in articles and interviews. The inspiration for the concept was an article by Joseph C. Pitt. Conceptual change and conceptual tension. Methodology and Science, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1981), pp. 132-138 Pitt speaks of “reactionary” and “progressive” rationalities.).
Westrum, Ron and Khalil Samaha. (1985). Complex Organizations: Growth, Struggle, and Change. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Wilensky, H. (1967). Organizational Intelligence. New York: Basic Books.
Withington, F. G. (1969). The Real Computer: Its Influence, Uses, and Effects. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 199–203. (Withington speculates about the use of the computer in a generative way, allowing access to the information in the system to a wider group.)
Worthy, James C. (1984), Shaping an American Institution: Robert E. Wood and Sears Roebuck. Urbana, EL: University of Illinois Press. Also see his unpublished book manuscript. Available from the Worthy, who is at the Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. Professor Worthy was kind enough to let me see this manuscript, which describes some of his classic studies for Sears. Worthy has shown in a recent book that the overall tendency of Robert Wood (Chief Executive Officer at Sears 1929–1954) was to decentralize decision-making to the maximum extent possible.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1987 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Westrum, R. (1987). Management Strategies and Information Failure. In: Wise, J.A., Debons, A. (eds) Information Systems: Failure Analysis. NATO ASI Series, vol 32. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83091-4_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83091-4_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-83093-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-83091-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive