The purpose of this commentary is to provide a review and preliminary assessment of Perrow’s Normal Accident Framework (NAF) as a theoretical statement and compare it with the High Reliability Organization Framework (HROF). Given the tendency of risk analysts to reduce complex systems to psychological processes and phenomena, it is suggested that continuing work with both the NAF and the HROF is important. These frameworks provide macroconstructs (power and culture, respectively) that could be integrated and that are essential for sociological analysis of complex systems. Investigations that expand the cases of analyses to include both systems with accidents and systems without is necessary for theory building that relies on the principle of falsification.
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