Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- ABNORMAL BLESSINGS -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 1. Normal Accident at Three Mile Island -- CHAPTER 2. Nuclear Power as a High-Risk System: Why We Have Not Had More TMIs-But Will Soon -- CHAPTER 3. Complexity, Coupling, and Catastrophe -- CHAPTER 4. Petrochemical Plants -- CHAPTER 5. Aircraft and Airways -- CHAPTER 6. Marine Accidents -- CHAPTER 7. Earthbound Systems: Dams, Quakes, Mines, and Lakes -- CHAPTER 8. Exotics: Space, Weapons, and DNA -- CHAPTER 9. Living with High-Risk Systems -- AFTERWORD -- POSTSCRIPT: THE Y 2 K PROBLEM -- LIST OF ACRONYMS -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

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 sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics railed

Las organizaciones son el fenómeno clave de nuestro tiempo, convirtiendo a la política, las clases sociales, la economía, la tecnología, la religión y la familia en variables dependientes. Se argumenta en este artículo que las organizaciones son la clave de la sociedad porque las grandes organizaciones han absorbido a la sociedad. Los tres fenómenos que constituyen la base de la argumentación son la dependencia salarial, la externalización del coste social, y el desarrollo y la difusión de una nueva forma de burocracia, la burocracia industrial.

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, and industry and firm self-regulation is the norm. As a result, new and potentially dangerous technologies such as fracking or mortgage backed derivatives are left unregulated, and older necessary regulations such as prohibitions are weakened. This article provides a joint criticism of the celebratory literature and the deregulation reality, and strongly advocates for a new sociology of regulation that both recognizes and documents these failures.