IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/36542.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Anatomy of a disaster: why some accidents are unavoidable

Author

Listed:
  • Downer, John

Abstract

This paper looks at the fateful 1988 fuselage failure of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 to suggest and illustrate a new perspective on the sociology of technological failure and the question of whether such failures are potentially avoidable. Drawing on core insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge, it highlights, and then challenges, a fundamental principle underlying our understanding of technological risk: idea that 'failures' always connote 'errors' and are, in principle, foreseeable. From here, it suggests a new conceptual tool for Disaster Theory, by proposing a novel category of man-made calamity: what it calls the 'Epistemic Accident'. It concludes by exploring the implications of Epistemic Accidents and sketching their relationship to broader issues concerning technology and society, and social theory's approach to failure.

Suggested Citation

  • Downer, John, 2010. "Anatomy of a disaster: why some accidents are unavoidable," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 36542, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:36542
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/36542/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Wendy Faulkner & James Fleck & Robin Williams, 1998. "Exploring Expertise: Issues and Perspectives," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Robin Williams & Wendy Faulkner & James Fleck (ed.), Exploring Expertise, chapter 1, pages 1-27, Palgrave Macmillan.
    2. David, Paul A, 1985. "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 75(2), pages 332-337, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Juliana Aurora de Oliveira Lopes & Léo Heller, 2020. "Explanatory Matrices on the Causes of a Tailing Dam Collapse in Brazil: The (Dis)Articulation of Epistemes," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 40(12), pages 2524-2538, December.
    2. Kirsten Davis & Navid Ghaffarzadegan & Jacob Grohs & Dustin Grote & Niyousha Hosseinichimeh & David Knight & Hesam Mahmoudi & Konstantinos Triantis, 2020. "The Lake Urmia vignette: a tool to assess understanding of complexity in socio‐environmental systems," System Dynamics Review, System Dynamics Society, vol. 36(2), pages 191-222, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Wiebke Roß & Jens Weghake, 2018. "Wa(h)re Liebe: Was Online-Dating-Plattformen über zweiseitige Märkte lehren," TUC Working Papers in Economics 0017, Abteilung für Volkswirtschaftslehre, Technische Universität Clausthal (Department of Economics, Technical University Clausthal).
    2. Marta Gancarczyk, 2010. "Model schyłku i odrodzenia klastrów," Gospodarka Narodowa. The Polish Journal of Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, issue 3, pages 1-21.
    3. Narduzzo, Alessandro & Warglien, Massimo, 1996. "Learning from the Experience of Others: An Experiment on Information Contagion," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 5(1), pages 113-126.
    4. John S. Earle & Klara Z. Sabirianova, 2002. "How Late to Pay? Understanding Wage Arrears in Russia," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 20(3), pages 661-707, July.
    5. Rehák Štefan & Buček Milan & Hudec Oto, 2013. "Path dependency and path plasticity in emerging industries," ZFW – Advances in Economic Geography, De Gruyter, vol. 57(1-2), pages 52-66, October.
    6. Beomjin Choi & T. S. Raghu & Ajay Vinzé & Kevin J. Dooley, 2019. "Effectiveness of standards consortia: Social network perspectives," Information Systems Frontiers, Springer, vol. 21(2), pages 405-416, April.
    7. Mahzouni, Arian, 2019. "The role of institutional entrepreneurship in emerging energy communities: The town of St. Peter in Germany," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 297-308.
    8. Georg Erber, 1994. "Verdoorn's or Okun's Law?: Employment and Growth Experiences in OECD Countries, 1960-1993," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 98, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    9. Atallah, Shadi S. & Huang, Ju-Chin & Leahy, Jessica & Bennett, Karen, 2020. "Preference Heterogeneity and Neighborhood Effect in Invasive Species Control: The Case of Glossy Buckthorn in New Hampshire and Maine Forests," 2020 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, Kansas City, Missouri 304623, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    10. McCloskey Deirdre Nansen, 2018. "The Two Movements in Economic Thought, 1700–2000: Empty Economic Boxes Revisited," Man and the Economy, De Gruyter, vol. 5(2), pages 1-20, December.
    11. Yunyao Li & Yanji Ma, 2022. "Research on Industrial Innovation Efficiency and the Influencing Factors of the Old Industrial Base Based on the Lock-In Effect, a Case Study of Jilin Province, China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(19), pages 1-23, October.
    12. Wenjun Guo & Wei Zhao & Min Min, 2022. "Operation Scale, Transfer Experience, and Farmers’ Willingness toward Farmland Transfer-In: A Case Study of Rice–Crayfish Cultivating Regions in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-16, March.
    13. Francesco Lamperti & Giovanni Dosi & Mauro Napoletano & Andrea Roventini & Alessandro Sapio, 2018. "And then he wasn't a she : Climate change and green transitions in an agent-based integrated assessment model," Working Papers hal-03443464, HAL.
    14. Mehrdad Vahabi, 1998. "The Relevance of the Marshallian Concept of Normality in Interior and in Inertial Dynamics as Revisited by G. SHACKLE and J. KORNAI," Post-Print hal-00629181, HAL.
    15. Christian Dahl Winther, 2007. "Optimal research effort and product differentiation in network industries," Economics Working Papers 2007-19, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    16. Randall Morck & Lloyd Steier, 2005. "The Global History of Corporate Governance: An Introduction," NBER Chapters, in: A History of Corporate Governance around the World: Family Business Groups to Professional Managers, pages 1-64, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Scharpf, Fritz W. & Mohr, Matthias, 1994. "Efficient self-coordination in policy networks: A simulation study," MPIfG Discussion Paper 94/1, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    18. Kevin Lansing, 2009. "Time Varying U.S. Inflation Dynamics and the New Keynesian Phillips Curve," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 12(2), pages 304-326, April.
    19. Cecere, Grazia & Corrocher, Nicoletta & Battaglia, Riccardo David, 2015. "Innovation and competition in the smartphone industry: Is there a dominant design?," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 162-175.
    20. Carayol, Nicolas & Dalle, Jean-Michel, 2007. "Sequential problem choice and the reward system in Open Science," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 167-191, June.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H0 - Public Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:36542. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.