Normal Accidents

Perrow, C. (1999). Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Basic Books.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1999

Link

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691004129/normal-accidents

Cited from

engineering_design, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

3 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Coupling
  • The inter-component dependency strength

    This sourceFounding statement that interactive complexity plus tight coupling makes system accidents inevitable; supports the inter-component-dependency and clarifying-commitment claims (coupling links distinguishable subsystems through specifiable channels).

  • Coupling is the structural relationship whereby two or more subsystems or variables are dynamically linked such that a change in one produces some change in the others, through a specifiable mechanism of interaction

    This sourceFrames coupling on a tight-to-loose continuum and analyzes its characteristic timescale (instantaneous vs. lagged) for disturbance propagation; supports the dynamic-linkage and time-criticality claims.

• Fail-Safe
  • The default-to-safe routing that assumes control pathway failure and maps failure to the predetermined safe state

    This sourceArgues that tight coupling and interactive complexity make certain accidents 'normal' (inevitable) in nuclear, chemical, and aerospace systems, so failures must be designed around rather than merely prevented.

Verification

This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.

Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://www.google.com/books/edition/Normal_Accidents/VC5hYoMw4N0C ×1

Registry ID ref:433a91ab737b · see in the full table