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Voice mail. E-mail. Bar codes. Desktops. Laptops. Networks. The Web. In this exciting book, Gene Rochlin takes a closer look at how these familiar and pervasive productions of computerization have become embedded in all our lives, forcing us to narrow the scope of our choices, our modes of control, and our experiences with the real world. Drawing on fascinating narratives from fields that range from military command, air traffic control, and international fund transfers to library cataloging and supermarket checkouts, Rochlin shows that we are rapidly making irreversible and at times harmful

A summary of my long engagement with Todd R. LaPorte as colleague, mentor, and fellow field worker in the study of large, reliability‐seeking organizations that manage risk‐bearing technologies is used to explore the relationship of our fieldwork approaches and techniques to other ethnographic means of sociological research. In particular, I discuss three organizations that have been at the core of what is generally known as the 'high reliability organization' project: air traffic control; nuclear power plant operations; and nuclear‐powered aircraft carriers at sea. In retrospect, our fieldwork was as intimate as that characterizing participant observers; yet, because of the complexity and risk involved in the sites of our study, we could only observe, and not participate.

Over the past few years, incidents and accidents that resulted directly from information technology failures have been noticed only by a small circle of analysts. Whatever the outcome when the clock strikes the first second of the year 2000, the Y2K 'crisis' has brought to general attention the vulnerabilities and dependencies of large, complex technical systems that depend largely, or in some cases entirely, on computers and networks for their operation. Moreover, the transition has only just begun. Over the next few years, many other industries, markets, bureaus, and regulatory and safety systems will transform their mode of operation to large, integrated systemic dependencies on IT; others will become increasingly dependent upon the reliable performance of other IT systems such as global positioning satellites or the Internet over which they have at best limited control. Where such operations are safety critical, as they are for air traffic control, economically critical, as they are for international financial transactions, individually critical, as they are for hospital and biomedical systems, or, finally, critical for those agencies and institutions whose primary goal is intervention, mitigation, or crisis management, surprises can be rapid, extensive, and interconnected to a degree that will in itself be surprising. This article uses some historical cases to explore the possible range of future crises and contingencies that might ensue.