Abstract
Over the course of her career, sociologist Diane Vaughan has become known for her studies of organizational failure: notably, her 1996 autopsy of the Challenger launch disaster. It is perhaps surprising, then, to see the contrast of her latest book, investigating how air traffic control—a social system emblematic of how organizations get it (mostly) right—manages to be so safe. Begun in 1998 and published more than two decades later, this long-awaited study is a breathtaking accomplishment: a sociological vivisection revealing the system’s anatomy, including a history of air traffic control within the United States, an ethnography of four air traffic control towers in the American Northeast, and a view into what happened when these organizations grappled with system-wide disruptions, in the form of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent modernization. Vaughan explores air traffic control with unparalleled care: an awe-inspiring breadth, depth, and lyricality that is mostly unmatched in contemporary scholarship on organizations, cementing her reputation as one of the most inspired scholars of her generation.
I believe that Vaughan’s book is an exemplar of what organization theory could, and even should, look like, given what the book’s analytic approach contributes to our understanding of organizations. In the following sections, I address a few essential facets of this analytic approach, expounding on how each addresses a significant pain point that scholars across our field—notably, those publishing within the pages of this very journal—have identified about how we study organizations. Specifically, I look closely at Vaughan’s focus on the work done within organizations, her dedication to multidimensional analysis of these organizations, and her interest in the interface between such organizations and society.
Work Within Organizations
One facet of Vaughan’s analytic approach revolves around the work that air traffic controllers do within their organizations: those everyday activities that these workers carry out to ensure smooth take-offs, flights, and landings. Specifically, she focuses on how controllers engage in what she terms “dead reckoning,” or the “procedure that attempts to locate [airplanes] in space or time by deduction” (p. 3). As Vaughan recounts, dead reckoning amid the initial days of flight entailed a great deal of faith. Early air traffic controllers, in attempting to ensure the safety of their era’s air travelers, went out into open airfields, looked into the sky, and attempted to calculate where planes were, hoping against hope that their estimations aligned with reality. This all prefaces Vaughan’s exploration into the kind of dead reckoning that today’s air traffic controllers now practice to keep the system safe. For instance, she writes extensively about how air traffic controllers, through intensive training and on-the-job experience, learn how to take in great quantities of information, discriminate between normal and irregular situations, and remain calm in the face of the unexpected: all to figure out where each plane is and what it is doing, to ensure that it is doing so safely. By looking at the work done by air traffic controllers within their organizations, Vaughan thus discovers some of what makes flying so safe.
In taking this kind of focus, Vaughan fulfills a key goal for organizational scholars, including those published within this very journal (e.g., Bechky, 2006; Delbridge & Sallaz, 2015). She grounds our theorizing in the realities of what has actually been happening inside organizations, at times contradicting our speculations on what might be happening inside them. This was particularly on display when she studied several organizations’ attempts at updating their technological infrastructures. As has been debated over by scholars (e.g., Collins, 2007; Fleming, 2019), popular discourse on automation has predicted that human beings will have no place in work settings increasingly dominated by emerging technologies. However, Vaughan’s study contradicts this view: in looking at work done within her organizations of focus, she uncovered that human beings working within the system were necessary to ensuring its safety and thus were irreplaceable, particularly given that the new technologies often failed. In one notable instance, the wind shifted in ways that the technology was not built to anticipate; controllers ended up turning it off that day and instead manually guiding planes into the airport. Through examples like these, Vaughan shows us what we might gain from study on work: theories that are an accurate account of what has actually been going on within organizations.
Multidimensional Analysis of These Organizations
Another facet of Vaughan’s analytic approach revolves around a form of organizational analysis which I feel can be best described as multidimensional: she looks at the organizations undergirding the system’s safety both vertically across levels of analysis—spanning the individual, organization, and system—and horizontally across the span of time. Vertically, she takes the work that individuals within air traffic control do to keep flying safe and shows how the seemingly individual act of dead reckoning is nested within, and thus is acted and acts upon, its broader social contexts. That is, controllers are socialized to embody and instinctually enact the rules devised by their local organizations, as well as those devised by the broader system, to the extent that these controllers can keep the system functioning safely without thinking. Thus, controllers can devote their presence of mind to those rare moments in which they must improvise against or around the rules that they have come to embody: usually those moments which the rules were not designed to anticipate, such as when a pilot acts anomalously. Vaughan thus analyzes what makes air traffic control safe by looking across levels of analysis.
Meanwhile, horizontally, Vaughan shows how the present form of safety in air traffic control is contextualized in, and shaped by, decades of history. In recounting the narrative behind how the world of American flight came to be, she demonstrates how each stage of its history has had indelible effects on what eventually would manifest as the safety of today’s air traffic control system. For instance, early attempts at carving up the sky—that is, creating invisible boundaries that would help air traffic controllers ensure planes’ safety by being able to locate them—were later carried on and renegotiated by subsequent generations, eventually resulting in the current system: an intricate set of boundaries, that must continually be rethought and renegotiated as we push toward an increasingly safe system. Vaughan thus looks at what makes air traffic control safe by examining history and its effect on the present. More broadly, in looking both vertically and horizontally at organizations, she proposes what I term a “four-dimensional approach” to air traffic control: one in which multilayered – that is, three-dimensional – organizations are situated in the fourth dimension of time.
In engaging in this four-dimensional approach to organizational analysis, Vaughan again fulfills the argued promise of organizational scholarship, as advanced by research featured within this journal (e.g., Fine & Hallett, 2014; Wadhwani, Suddaby, Mordhorst, & Popp, 2018). That is, Vaughan induces fundamental mechanisms undergirding how organizations function, ranging from how various levels of analysis interact within the context of organizations to how historical trends may shape an organization’s present. In so doing, she contributes to a broader analytical toolkit of conceptual frameworks that we can variously draw on while studying organizations, and that may even be applied to those forms of organizing far afield from her context. It is notable, for example, that this is not the only context in which Vaughan addresses what she calls the “causal” role of history on the present. In her study of the Challenger accident, she was able to follow how past decisions to accommodate behavior previously deemed unsafe gradually expanded the boundaries around what was considered safe, normalizing these acts of deviance over time in ways that ultimately led to the disaster. Mechanisms like the “causal” role of history, which Vaughan has carried across cases, demonstrate the utility of a multidimensional approach. In illuminating the processes by which a given organization functions, it provides the basis for our ability to abstract beyond our case and understand how organizations function more broadly.
Organizations and Society
Yet another facet of Vaughan’s analytic approach revolves around her concern not only with organizations alone but also with their consequences, more broadly, for society. At stake in air traffic control is an aspect of social life crucial to our society's members: their safety, or their ability to stay alive and well even amid situations of crisis. This societal importance of the work of dead reckoning haunts the everyday of air traffic controllers, brought into stark relief through Vaughan’s account of the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Amid a situation in which the safety of flight was more compromised than at any other time in American history, the country’s government shut down its airspace. In response, the existing organizational system of air traffic control, in an act of collective dead reckoning that took on unprecedented proportions, emptied the sky in a matter of hours, then later put all of the system’s planes back in flight. This was accomplished by the controllers doing what they had always done: following rules dedicated to safety and improvising where those rules left off. In so doing, organizations across the air traffic control system, navigating the aftermath of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, ensured that no further lives were lost. This extreme situation allows Vaughan to reveal how organizations scaffold crucial parts of our society, particularly amid crisis.
In prioritizing this concern with society, Vaughan once again allows for what scholars (e.g., Barley, 2010) hoped to see in organizational scholarship. That is, Vaughan demonstrates how organization theory can speak to issues of significance to our current moment, focusing on an aspect of our lives – our safety – not only important in the context of flight, but also threatened by pressing causes like emerging viruses, climate change, and gun violence. This ability to speak to such core social issues, and thus to be relevant, has been all the more important given concern over organization theory’s future. Though organizations of all kinds continue to play a crucial role across society today, there has been an overwhelming sense that organization theory has been pushed to the “brink of irrelevance,” unable or unwilling as it has been to speak to current dilemmas (King, 2017, p. 131). Vaughan, by contrast, shows how we can produce research accurate to what is happening within organizations, attuned to understanding how these organizations function, and relevant to what these organizations and our broader society face. She thereby provides a destination: a possibility toward which we can aspire as we dead reckon our way toward the future of our field.
