The requirement for maintaining responsiveness and flexibility with a high degree of operational reliability and safety puts considerable demand on any organization. In the case of US Navy flight operations at sea, conditions of extraordinarily tight coupling and high technical complexity, flexible demand and uncertain environment provide more potential sources of crisis and acci dent than there are management personnel or permanent structures to cope with them. This paper discusses the Navy's evolved and relatively successful strategy of creating and maintaining a set of informal, evanescent, functional networks whose primary purpose is to anticipate and deflect emerging crises rather than merely react to them.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Demchak, C.C., 1987. War, technological complexity, and the U.S. Army. PhD dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA.
2.
Dreyfus, H.L. and Dreyfus, S.E., 1986. Mind Over Machine. Free Press, New York.
3.
Galbraith, Jay R., 1977. Organizational Design, Addison-Wesley , Reading, MA.
4.
Galbraith, John K., 1968. The New Industrial State. Signet, New York.
5.
Halpern, J.J., 1989. Cognitive factors influencing decision making in a highly reliable organization. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 3: 143-158 (this issue).
Kmetz, J.L., 1984. An information processing study of a complex workflow in aircraft electronics repair. Administrative Science Quarterly,29: 255-280.
8.
Landau, M., 1973. Redundancy, rationality and the problem of duplication and overlap. Public Administration Review, 29: 346-358.
9.
Landau, M. and Stout, R., Jr., 1979. To manage is not to control: or the folly of type II errors. Public Administration Review , 39: 148-156.
10.
La Porte, T.R. (Editor), 1975. Organized Social Complexity. Princeton University Press , Princeton, NJ.
11.
La Porte, T.R., 1982. On the design and management of nearly error-free organizational control systems. In: D. Sills, C. Wolf and V. Shelanski (Editors), The Accident and Three Mile Island: the Human Dimensions. Westview Press, Boulder, CO: 185-200.
12.
Lerner, A.W., 1986. There is more than one way to be redundant. Administration and Society, 18: 334-359.
13.
March, J.G. and Weissinger-Baylon, R., 1986. Ambiguity and Command: Organizational Perspectives on Military Decision-Making. Pitman, Marshfield, MA.
14.
Nias, J., 1975. The sorcerer's apprentice: complexity in educational systems . In: T.R. La Porte (Editor), Organized Social Complexity. Princeton University Press , Princeton, NJ: 256-278.
15.
Perrow, C., 1970. Organizational Analysis: a Sociological View. Wadsworth, Belmont, CA.
16.
Perrow, C., 1984. Normal Accidents. Basic Books, New York.
17.
Perrow, C., 1986. Complex Organizations: a Critical Essay (3rd ed.). Random House, New York.
18.
Rasmussen, J., 1986. Information Processing and Human-Machine Interaction: an Approach to Cognitive Engineering. North-Holland, Amsterdam.
19.
Rasmussen, J. and Batstone, R. (Editors), in press. Proceedings of the World Bank Workshop on Safety Control and Risk Management. World Bank, Washington, DC.
20.
Roberts, K.H., 1989. New challenges in organizational research: high reliability organizations. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 3: 111-125 (this issue).
21.
Roberts, K.H. and Gargano, G., 1989. Managing a high reliability organization: a case for interdependence . In: M.A. Von Glinow and S. Mohrman (Editors), Managing Complexity in High Technology Industries: Systems and People. Oxford University Press, New York.
22.
Rochlin, G.I., 1985. Shotguns and sharpshooters: command and control as elements of U.S. weapons acquisitions policies. Working Paper on Public Administration 85-2, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California , Berkeley, CA.
23.
Rochlin, G.I., La Porte, T.R. and Roberts, K.H., 1987. The self-designing high-reliability organization: aircraft carrier flight operations at sea. Naval War College Review , Autumn 1987: 76-90.
24.
Scott, R., 1981. Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (2nd ed.). Prentice-Hall, New York.
25.
Shrivastava, P., 1987. Bhopal: Anatomy of a Crisis. Ballinger , Cambridge, MA.
26.
Simon, H., 1976. Administrative Behavior. Free Press , New York.
27.
Stinchcombe, A.L., 1962. Bureaucratic and craft administration of production: a comparative study. Administrative Science Quarterly,6: 463-482.
28.
Taylor, J.S., 1975. Organizational complexity in the new industrial state: the role of technology. In: T.R. La Porte (Editor), Organized Social Complexity. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ: 77-118.
29.
Thompson, J.D., 1967. Organizations in Action. McGraw-Hill , New York.
