Building explanations from data is an important but usually invisible process behind
all published research. Here I reconstruct my theorizing for an historical
ethnography of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and the NASA
(National Aeronautical and Space Administration) decisions that produced that
accident. I show how analogical theorizing, a method that compares similar events or
activities across different social settings, leads to more refined and generalizable
theoretical explanations. Revealing the utility of mistakes in theorizing, I show
how my mistakes uncovered mistakes in the documentary record, converting my analysis
to a revisionist account that contradicted the conventional explanation accepted at
the time. Retracing how I developed the concepts and theory that explained the case
demonstrates the connection between historic political and economic forces,
organization structure and processes, and cultural understandings and actions at
NASA. Finally, these analytic reflections show how analysis, writing, and theorizing
are integrated throughout the research process.
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