 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called First Person Plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. On Saturday, February 1st, many of us woke up to the news that the Space Shuttle Columbia had been lost. As the day wore on, those of us old enough to remember the Challenger explosion in 1986 realized that seven more people had died and that another shuttle had been tragically destroyed. The same kinds of questions that were asked then are being asked again. Basic questions about space travel, scientific knowledge, government funding, and safety. Boston College sociologist Diane Vaughn studied the organizational aspects of the Challenger launch decision. NASA faltered the launch decision-making process, stating that critical errors were made by key players in the hours before the launch. Vaughn, however, found that these key players had followed the decision-making processes by the book. The problem, she asserted, lay in the normalization of deviance found in the culture of NASA. Safety considerations were treated as routine, incremental decisions with little built into the system to allow for players to assess how these incremental decisions were increasing risk. Today on First Person Plural, we talk with Dr. Vaughn about her ideas as we consider the consequences of ignoring social context and an episode we call the way we've always done it. Civilization is that when the space shuttle Columbia exploded on February 1st, the most immediate public reaction after the customary expressions of grief and disbelief was to place fraudulent listings for pieces of shuttle debris on the eBay website. While eBay shut down these listings within hours of their posting, such behavior was not unprecedented in American culture. Perhaps more telling of the ritualized aspects of American society is that in less than a week after February 1st, questions arose about the appointment of the so-called independent panel of investigators to assess the shuttle accident. Within days of convening the panel, NASA had to reorganize it amid criticism that the panel personnel were too close to NASA leadership and that the panel was too much under NASA control. More independent members were added and the reporting structure shifted to the Naval Safety Center rather than NASA. To underscore the failure of achieving independence, the word independent was changed to external in the news briefings given by NASA officials. What was supposed to have been a built-in response to any shuttle accident ended up relying more upon the rhetoric of independence than upon ensuring a substantially independent probe. Again, while the lack of independence was resolved eventually, such disparities between speech and action were not surprising or unprecedented in American culture. Americans often accept extreme levels of mechanical ritualized decision-making, accompanied by code words that often are not grounded in practice. The custom of avoiding critical thinking in favor of performance of ritual behavior is strong. In a bureaucracy that is sufficiently complex that no street-level bureaucrat can possibly know all of the regulations pertaining to his agency, let alone to any other organ of public policy administration, the stop-gap solution is, and must be for the low-ranking bureaucrat, to comply with his superior's most recent instructions and hope that such acquiescence is enough to save his job. Besides, as in the private sector hierarchies, the boss may not always be right, but he is still the boss. The possibility of democracy is the obvious first casualty of such resignation. A casualty that follows all too soon after is the possibility of the agency or agencies fulfilling any manifest function. Dr. Frankenstein could bring the monster to life, but he could not control him afterwards. Likewise, how the internal mechanisms of an agency function determine what it will produce or destroy in the end. An elected official can make as many speeches as he likes about the need to make government perform certain functions, but the intricacies of mundane operation of the agencies involved must be addressed if the desired results are to be achieved. To blame superfluous levels of management is effective only up to a point. The fantasy that all members of an organization can, quote, just know, close quote, what to do, and that they will do it upon such a realization is one prone to serious battering when exposed to real-world considerations, even the real world of the public sector. To give administration short shrift is to buy into the notion that all management is created equal and that all managers are created equal. A corollary is that it doesn't matter how anything is managed or by whom, that results in any given organization or independent of the actions of those who run it, the process by which it is decided who will run it, and the processes by which those who will run it are prepared for the tasks at hand, the lapse in analytical diligence that presumes or simply declares that government is perfectly organized by some unspecified but uniquely determined standard is used every day as part of recitation after recitation, that everything is in order, everything is proceeding well enough, no one is screaming, and any assertions to the contrary must therefore be due to dark ulterior motives. Administrations that eschew any diagnostics at all pertaining to their dynamics have not only made themselves deaf to the loudest of wake-up calls, they have taken the telephone and pitched it out a closed window, such as the culture of many organizations in government and business. The results of this lack of self-reflections within the culture can be devastating in any context but add to this the dangers of space flight, the realities of government funding, and the politics of public-private partnerships, and the results can be tragic. All too often this cultural assessment is left out of the technical, scientific, and human factor assessments of health and safety issues. Sociological and organizational assessments are not welcomed, not funded, and not considered in changes to public policies. Yet the cultural climate still gives context to the assessments. The lack of scrutiny does not lessen the effects. Pretending to live outside the fishbowl may be comforting, but the water still ripples when you swim. In the late 1980s, Diane Vaughan took an interest in the organizational aspects of the assessment of the challenger. After nine years of research involving thousands of pages of documents and extensive in-depth interviews with key participants in the launch decision-making process, Vaughan produced an assessment of what had gone wrong that differed sharply from the official assessment. Officially the conclusion was that key players made fateful decisions about the suitability of the launch under extreme cold weather conditions. The decision to launch in spite of warnings was sharply criticized after the fact. Vaughan argues persuasively, however, that this decision was not outside the organizational box. Like many other decisions made before each launch, the decision to dismiss the concerns was business as usual. The key players were following procedure, not breaking it. Her book, The Challenger Launch Decision, Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, published in 1996, has quickly become a must-read for many engineering students. It has not, however, been recognized or discussed openly by NASA officials. This affects how the investigation will proceed. Such investigations become the quintessential case studies in what can happen if an important stream of knowledge is simply ignored. I definitely want to start by thanking you for taking time to talk with us this week. I know you've probably had a lot of media attention since the accident on Saturday. And I have to tell you that I'm always pleased when a sociologist gets noticed, but I imagine you have some mixed reactions to having your work, having renewed attention in your work. Well, it's good to have done something useful, but it's bad when it's seen as useful after some people have to die. Also, I was so very closely connected to Challenger as were most of the people who are covering the media event, you know, doing media coverage now. And most people are having an emotional reaction to it or trying to cover the story and so on. So it's kind of a weird sort of dual role to play when these things happen. It is. It's a national tragedy in that there's work to do in relation to it. I'll start with asking you what kinds of questions are you hoping that investigators will ask as they do the assessment after the Columbia tragedy? At this point, they're most intensely looking for the source of the technical failure, which I expect will take some time. It's unlike Challenger in that immediately there was a smoking gun that turned out to be what they're calling the root cause of the disaster. And this time they don't have the same kind of evidence because the explosion and breakup occurred as it was re-entering space rather than at launch. So the kind of evidence available is very different. But subsequent to pinning it on the erosion of the O-rings, the previous investigation looked at the organizational and institutional sources of problems at NASA. So it wasn't just seen as a technical failure, but as an organizational failure. This meant that not only the solid rocket boosters had to be redesigned, but there had to be some redesign of the organization as well. At this point, of course, we don't understand yet what the technical cause of this failure was. It may have been something that was really out of NASA's control and there wasn't any kind of organizational contribution to the failure. For example, a meteor might have hit it or some unprecedented situation might have come up. Nonetheless, there's some evidence already that the organization itself and its circumstances are worth investigating. Are you wanting to speculate a little bit about that evidence and where it might lead or is it just too early to talk about that? There's some evidence suggesting that internally NASA, there had been many cuts to safety personnel. This evidence comes from a government accounting office report that was made public in the media this past week. It indicated that NASA had drastically cut their safety personnel and people in the engineering operation, technicians and so on. Some interviews with insiders said that a lot of them were key people. They don't do that willy-nilly. It happens because they have budget constraints and they're unable to carry the full load of people that they would like to have. There may be other reasons, of course, but the immediate thing I think of is NASA has always operated on a shoestring and we don't know yet what the technical problem was that caused this. But if budget cuts made them cut safety personnel, whether or not that interfered with this particular launch or not, that's something that needs to be reconsidered if the system is to remain in operation in the future. I used to work with Honeywell and I worked on the space station program for a while as a project administrator in my other life, pre-sociology. And I know that one of the reasons why I went back to school was because there were massive layoffs and I've heard some people call those kind of layoffs dumbing down instead of downsizing. Is that the kind of phenomenon that's going on when they lay off safety people? Are they losing a certain amount of knowledge by letting go of those people? They do lose knowledge by letting go of those people. This happens also when other kinds of organizations, for example, hospitals merge. Some people have to be let go. There's a new language that has to be acquired and a new experience that has to be acquired by people that then come on board. So for a while until this experience gets built up again, their hospitals are very vulnerable to mistake. Dumbing down is a very good term. There may be cuts because there were redundancies in the system and they were trying to streamline as well. So until we know more information about the kind of people who were cut and why the cuts were made, we don't have very good understanding but right now it doesn't look good. It may have nothing to do with what happened in this situation. We'll have to wait until we find out exactly what the engineering analysis shows. But still, it doesn't vote well in the long run. It is at least a place that needs to be investigated. When you did your research, you came to some different conclusions than the official assessment of what went wrong with the Challenger disaster. I wonder if, well I wonder, your book came out in what, 1995, is that right? 1996. Okay. Have you had any indication that your conclusions have been noticed by NASA at all? So none at all by NASA, which is interesting because I've heard from numbers of engineers and former NASA employees through email and phone calls and letters, but nothing official from NASA. So you have no idea whether or not they've even read the book? I think they have read the book. I was on a talk show this morning with a former astronaut who is now teaching at MIT and he uses it in his class. So I know that people there are aware of it. I know when I did an internet search on the book name and on your name, I found it coming up quite a bit in engineering classes across the country, which I thought was a very good sign, but I didn't really see it coming up in anything connected officially with NASA. Do you think that, well I guess the one incident obviously is going to contextualize this one. You know that this is the second shuttle that has had something go wrong. Can you tell me what you think the earlier investigation, how the earlier investigation will affect this investigation? I guess what I'm looking for is do you think that there's going to be pressure to do it faster, pressure to do it more thoroughly? I just can't see it happening in a vacuum and them not considering the first one while they investigate the second one. No, and you can see dramatic differences because of mistakes they made the first time. When the Challenger exploded, there were contingency plans for a technical failure in the engineering operation, but they didn't even have a contingency plan for how to deal with the public or the media in the event of an accident. So chaos reigned. The second factor was that there was, you know, what's happened this time is that there's been a dramatic correction. They did have a plan this time and we see the space shuttle program manager run a bit more every day at the same time, keeping people up to date on the investigation as it happens. So that is a dramatic change from what happened initially too for Challenger that was cover-up because there was disagreement on the evening of the launch about whether or not they should launch the next day given the unprecedented cold temperatures and what engineers were predicting might happen to the O-rings. There were things that they were trying to keep from public view. And this time there has been a very openness even about their confusion and about their grief, which I think creates much more trust in terms of what's happening with the investigation. So these are very big changes. Do you think that there'll be some substantial changes in the way that they go about doing the investigation? One thing just changed which was they had established an independent oversight investigation team and immediately there was a response by some people in Congress and the media that these people worked closely tied to NASA and didn't represent any kind of an independent team. They're adding new members and taking some off and reconstituting it and rather than the team working for NASA, which was the case before, now the team is in charge and they're overseeing NASA's whole investigation. What way do you think that that'll affect the investigation? I don't know. I do want to say though it's a difficult choice because in order to have technical experts looking for the cause of the technical failure you need to have people who understand something about how the shuttle operates so that by definition means people that have some kind of connection to NASA. On the other hand, you want them to be not interdependent, but you want them to be autonomous and to be able to be objective about it and disconnected and you really can't have it both ways. So maybe they will build eventually an investigative team that has a little bit of both. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV 101.9 FM, Victoria. I'd like to switch gears a little bit. I'm intrigued by the process that you did in researching for your book. I've read that it took you about nine years and that you went through thousands of pages of documents and interviews and did some independent interview of your own. Most sociology research is not quite that extensive and I imagine you ran into some very peculiar problems along the way. So can you tell me a little bit about the process? My initial idea was that I would write a short paper and then as I got more into it and discovered it was more complicated, the idea changed to do maybe a chapter in a book and then I thought, well, maybe a slender volume. And the next thing I knew it was a 500-page book. Actually it was the next thing I knew it was far down the road. What happened was that I started with some hypotheses based on what the Presidential Commission was finding. Those had to do with rule violations, suppression of information, production pressure. All of those things seemed to me to be connected with what was known in research on corporate misconduct and though this wasn't a corporation, it was clear that from what the Presidential Commission revealed initially that some parallels happened. I began with that kind of hypothesis but then as I got away from media reports and the Presidential Commission's summary volume which was 180 pages and into the original archival data I kept having the things that I believed were general and important factors relevant to this disaster having information crop up that falsified them. So, for example, much was written about in the press about NASA's kind of can-do macho culture with the National Archives for photographs for the NASA history in Washington, D.C. I found a photograph of technicians putting together the solid rocket boosters, stacking them and they were dressed like surgeons. They were wearing rubber gloves. They had their hair covered in bonnets. They were wearing all white and they had booties over their shoes. This doesn't seem like a macho risk-taking organization. A critical turning point was when I got deeply enough to be reading the decision-making rules and how information was conveyed throughout the organization and comparing that with written documents about what they did and discovered there were no rules violated. They had gone strictly by the book which in fact turned out to be one of the problems. If I had known in the beginning it was going to take nine years, I never would have started at that. I always thought the missing pieces to the puzzle were just around the corner. It turned out to be a big puzzle. It did. You also did some in-depth interviews and it was a little bit different, I imagine, than what most sociological interviewing is like because I imagine that these people were a little reluctant to talk to you and I also imagine that it would be quite difficult for you to offer them anonymity. Anonymity was never even crossed my mind because they had said in public televised hearings before the Presidential Commission their names and what their information was and the story was history. The people that I wanted to interview were people in key positions of making decisions about the solid rocket boosters and by the time I knew enough to do my interviewing with them they had either resigned from Morton Thyakal who was the contractor manufacturer for solid rocket boosters or moved to different jobs in the organization and people at NASA had either been shifted or retired so they were available and there were some engineers who were still working at NASA who were willing to help me. So it wasn't as difficult as I expected but what I needed to be able to do was compare the things that they said afterwards with what they did at the time and I had engineering documents and original memos at the National Archives on which to do that comparison. You talk about normalization of deviance as part of the sort of core problem that went on when you said that they actually followed the rules that they were supposed to follow. Do you see this as something that happens in a lot of organizations? Is this peculiar to certain kinds of organizations? Can we do a little bit of generalizing about the way that organizations work from your work? I think it probably does happen in a lot of organizations but I think the problem is particularly pronounced at NASA and there's a tendency for it to be an aspect of culture that's constant for them for the following reasons. They work on an unprecedented technology that's still experimental. This is not standardized like an airplane. Second, it will always be subject to forces of the environment that they can't predict and because it's reusable will come back with problems. So having problems is normal for NASA. Their job is to correct those problems and fix them and get it ready to go again. Flying with problems that maybe have chronic histories is a part of their routine operation. The difficulty comes in saying how serious is the problem. And that's based on tests that are sometimes contradictory and they try to get as good of an evidence as they can but it's impossible to predict all the contingencies. And so in this kind of a situation it's easy to get into the position of tolerating component parts with chronic problems and if it turns out that it is the tile problem and we don't know that yet so there's a caution there because I'm strictly speculating if it turns out it's a tile problem it looks identical to what happened with Challenger and the O-Rings. If that's the case and the root cause then they apparently have not learned the lesson of flying with systematic flaws and continuing to go under those circumstances. The idea of the normalization of deviants is that people become used to flying with anomalies under certain conditions. I can't think of another organization where the background of having problems would be a part of the context. I guess the last thing that I'd like to ask is there are a lot of debates going on in a lot of different areas right now with science and technology and engineering. A number of people say things in popular discourse about science kind of going too fast and discovering too much and getting too far ahead and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where you see sociology contributing to understanding how science and society kind of interact with each other. I mean in some ways that's what your work is doing is sort of casting a sociological eye on scientific and technological advances. From a sociological perspective we would look at science as having a social context itself and part of that is the cultural image of it is perfect and unassailable. This is part of what's happening with the challenger. People had started to take spaceflight routine and they're not aware that both science and technology have that kind of messy underside where people are trying to figure out problems in unprecedented situations. I think sociology has a capacity to reveal how the work of scientists proceeds and that kind of incremental learning by mistake that goes on which is demethodologizing, however you say that. The other thing is that science occurs in the context of organizations that produce it and also use it and that affects the science itself. So for example in Challenger the main finding was it was not just a technical failure but there was an institutional failure in the NASA organization as well in terms of cultural changes, production pressures, a kind of normalization of deviants that went on that was a strong contributing factor to the technical failure. So I think that not only in terms of keeping the general public informed but in terms of policy, sociology has quite a lot to say. I would imagine that what we're looking at here is not just so much analyzing the past but hoping that policymakers within these organizations will consider these factors and built in ways of dealing with it, some sort of self-assessment occasionally about asking questions about what they're doing in connection to safety and risk and those kind of things. We have scientists and technical experts now being gathered together to be on NASA's internal investigation team, the independent one. They are trained in a certain way to look for specific things and they're looking for the causes of the technical failure. They aren't trained to look for the organizational contribution to that. So without having some social scientists on board they're not able to discover how the context might have affected it. They can uncover pieces of the puzzle but I think it takes skilled social analysts to put it together in a way that those kinds of contributing factors can be corrected. The tendency in accident investigations is to have people involved who are used to doing human factors analysis which means focusing on individuals, not the work context and the assumptions they hold and how that affects the work that they do. Well, hopefully your book will start changing that. I'm glad to hear that it is getting some attention as I think that it is making a major contribution to this area. Well, thank you very much. I was anxious to interview Diane because I think that her book is one of the best examples that I can think of of where sociology should be in public policy and the fact that she had to do it independently instead of as part of the investigation into what happened to Challenger is also very telling. I think it's even more telling that she's not been invited to NASA to discuss this and that she didn't come up as a name of someone that they should put on the independent panel to look at what happened to Columbia. Sociology just isn't at the table. You know, she was talking towards the end of the interview about accident investigation and how the people who look into quote-unquote human factors are people who analyze individual behavior. I thought that was extremely telling. That, to me, suggests that what I see as a cult of individualism in the United States has dire consequences. I mean, it just does not occur to these investigators that there is a contextual level, a cultural level to examine. I remember you asked me one time after going to the library and doing some research what happened to sociological research after 1980. Yeah, I remember that. I was doing a paper on a lot and I noticed that all the titles of relevance were 1980 or before, well, not all of them, but the distribution was very heavily skewed. And I thought, well, this may be a function of the particular library. Then I thought, well, then again, it may not. And I thought I'd ask you about it, thinking that you might have more of a background on the subject. And I think what happened in 1980 was a government commitment to marginalizing social research. You're speaking of the U.S. government? Yes. Well, yeah, we're talking United States areas. And they were told, don't color outside the lines, period. They weren't told, you can't have funding for coloring outside the lines. They were told, you just can't do it. No, they were told you can't have funding, but no funding equaled, no tenure. And so in other words, I don't think anybody made this explicit. I think it would be incorrect to say a bunch of people called a bunch of researchers into a room and said to them, you will no longer do research. What happened was that the research that was done either didn't get published or it got published in journals that nobody paid attention to. And it didn't get funded. And therefore it didn't get done as quickly as it needed to be done, which made it irrelevant or made it so late that professors weren't getting tenured when they did that kind of research. So there was a lot of institutional pressures to do the kind of research that was being funded. And it's very frustrating also to do this kind of research and then have no policy change made on it. I mean, if you're not connected to some sort of political arm that takes a look at your research and says, what kind of public policy can be made, you can get discouraged and burned out very quickly. And that's another problem we've discussed privately. It's one thing to be told, no, no, you just can't do that. If you're told that, then you know what the problem is. The problem is you're being repressed or whatever. But the other more insidious problem that we've talked about is when you're allowed to do your research, it's funded. So there's a nice level playing field. You bring your research to those who make decisions as a practical matter and they read it over and simply do what they were going to do anyway. In fact, you don't even know if that's what they were doing. You don't know, as a matter of fact, in any particular case, whether they really did give your evidence as it were some weight or whether they just went through the motions and did what they were going to do anyway. The former problem is easily recognized by comparison. The latter is a great deal more subtle. Yeah, and I think both are going on with the change in the federal government in the 1980s. And because of this, there are consequences. I mean, it's one thing to go, okay, well, that's just the philosophy of the government. The government isn't interested in social stuff anymore. The government has decided to be the fiscal and military organization and protect the country. No other institution has the wherewithal or the ability to enact policy than government. Well, that's changing. It's reaching the point where corporations are simply enacting their own laws. Yeah, the social happens anyway is what I'm saying. Their ability to enforce it is, of course, the issue. But it's becoming, depending on how you feel about it, more or less of an issue every day. Corporations, to a great extent worldwide, if somebody decided that they're the ones who are going to be sovereign. But they're not going to enact any kind of public good policy. What they're doing is filling in this gap with their own interests. That's entirely possible. Well, I don't know. I guess that would be true at NASA too, even in this case, because we're looking at a lot of private interests involved in the shuttle. I was watching a show the other day that was talking about the investigation into Columbia. It is involving a private company because they're concentrating on the refitting of the shuttle and the refitting of the shuttle after each flight is actually done on a contract basis with a private company. It's not government employees who go and check those tiles afterwards and replace them and go over the system and everything. It's overseen by NASA, but it's not NASA employees. It's employees of a private company. Even when we're talking about a government agency, we are often talking about a government agency that is using a lot of private labor. So the split becomes fuzzy. I've been reading John Rothston Saul's book, The Unconscious Civilization this week, and I've had mixed feelings about it. He blames, quote, management, close quote, for a lot of the problems in the 1990s, and he launched public and private management together. I wouldn't do that because I've been to graduate school in both subjects in effect. I have an MBA, which was a degree geared specifically at the school I attended to private management. And I also attended a, quote, political science, close quote, post-baccalaureate program that turned out to be not a political science program, but an enculturation program for future public sector bureaucrats. Yes, and I tried to make it into a political science program, and it was made clear to me that I was no longer welcome there. We'll omit the details of my personal experiences, except to point out that the curricula were very different indeed. And that's where I parked company with Saul most enthusiastically. He claims that public is private, and private is public, and the problem is that the government is being run by a corporation, which is the last possible way anyone should consider running it if they're going to run it in good faith. And I'd suggest the opposite. I would say that my private administration training was very much about how to be a creative consultant and come up with solutions outside the box and show the people from these corporations who had called you in to be professionally clever and had a high rate of compensation therefore how to go about doing things that they wouldn't have thought of themselves. And you put this in cultural context, did you not? I mean, there was a lot of discussion about what was the cultural nature of a workplace, how did the normative behavior and the organizational behavior affect people who worked within these environments? There was enormous discussion of it. There was so much discussion of it that the students started to get a little irritated after a while and how much emphasis the professors put on it. The professors did not want us settling into a formula. It was not a redraw the tree, collect your fee sort of program. But your experience post-graduation has been that the real world isn't really interested in this? Some texts of what I hear from people in the quote real world close quote is almost uniformly, we don't give a damn what they told you at university. This is the way we do things here boy. You're all going to learn how to steal and kill if you want to be part of this ranch, what you're crying for boy. And that's where the schism has occurred. It had nothing to do with my training. Well, not the private training. The public training was another issue. There was the ideology and you either followed it or got the hell out. My attempts at hour checking to use my earlier term and lateral thinking are basically met with being told no, no, that's just not the way it is. You're too smart to be here. Well, no, I raised the question of epistemology and that's something you simply don't do in a pre-bureaucracy program as it turns out. That was the point at which we were told this is the dogma learn it. So when you question knowledge in MBA school, you were pat on the back and said, wow, that's good thinking outside the box. And when you question knowledge in Masters of Public Administration school, I got told shut up, sit in your seat, learn the dogma. First person plural, your source, pursuing sounds of sociological sagaciousness. The police state is using its phallocentric organ, the corporate media, to control ordinary people like you and me. So how does that translate in the real world? I wonder if in practice, do these administrators do something different than what they're taught in school. In other words, do all the MBAs learn this wonderful stuff in school and then head off to Enron and act ritualistically and do all the MPAs learn the dogma in school and then go off into their respective jobs and become creative. I would say that the MPAs are basically well trained in that their training corresponds very closely to what they're expected to do once they get out. And that is obey the instructions of the person just above them in the organizational chain. It's important to note that with any sufficiently complex bureaucracy, the rank and file cannot understand all of the quote regulations, close quote, that they have to follow. So what they wind up doing as a practical matter is obeying the most recent dictum of their immediate superior. I have a friend who did a paper about this based upon her encounters with a government agency in an attempt to get a special certificate. What she learned was it did not matter what the dogma was. What went on was a repeating of ritual. So she brought regulations to them and said, you know, here I'm following the rules and they responded, well, I have these concerns because the way we usually do this is. And it ended up being an individual negotiation instead of grounded in the rules and regulations of the agency. In other words, it wasn't quite as scientific a management as it was supposed to be. It was much more negotiation. It was a negotiation that was grounded in the culture of the office more than in the explicit rules and regulations of the agency. A lot of surprise. Who would have guessed that local culture, supersedes, top-down administration. Whoa. I'm so surprised. Well, that's my point. A sociologist would have guessed it, but nobody would have asked them. I recall one of Diane's comments from the interview, quote, strictly by the book, which was one of the problems, close quote, and that kind of ritualized administration inevitably supports what you're saying. If there is nothing but the form, then there's going to be something lost. It's just a question of what. And the way that a bureaucracy checks or does not check for these sorts of things, physical and mental, that slip through the cracks is a key to whether it's a bureaucracy being operated in good faith or being operated because it's customary to operate it and for no other reason. Well, there's a certain social psychology going on here that I think is important to understand what Diane was trying to say. And it's been interesting because since interviewing her, I've heard a couple of debates on the radio and I've been paying attention to the news more. And it confirmed some of what she's talking about. NASA has two goals when it comes to the shuttle, okay? Goal one is to keep the fleet of shuttles going so that one shuttle goes up, it comes back down, it has to be retrofitted again before it goes back up because a certain amount of damage occurs by going up and coming back down, okay? And so there's a lot of effort put into keeping the fleet going. And this effort was envisioned in the 1970s as being akin to an airport, airlines have to do this all the time. Every time an airplane flies, things happen to it. And those things have to be inspected and repaired and maintained in order to ensure the safety of the aircraft the next time it flies. The shuttle has turned out to be a much bigger problem. They are still having to treat the shuttle the same way they treated Apollo and Gemini and Mercury. And that is not what they wanted to do. They wanted to have it much more routinized, much easier to go up and come back down again. And that's been a great disappointment because it has sucked up a lot of the funds that could have been used to create a new aircraft. It's very odd in the world of aerospace engineering to not have a new model at this point. The shuttle is a 35-year-old design. If you look anywhere else in aeronautics, a 35-year-old design is an old design. There should be a new one, but there hasn't been money for the new one. Well, there's been money for it. It's simply gone to other programs, not only other programs within the American federal budget, but other space-oriented programs. Commercial satellites, spy satellites, satellites carrying nuclear payloads, and other Star Wars type projects that are going on even today. What I want to get lost in the technology here, what I want to come back to is this normalization of deviance. Here we have a group of people who have to make the shuttle safe every time it comes back. And so they start taking these safety factors for granted. So the social psychology in this normal procedure is to treat these factors as routine. I mean, it's important that they do this because if they get too much outside the box, they don't keep the fleet going. So we have something that's extremely dangerous that needs them out of the box thinking, but it also needs this routine in order to go up every time. One of the insidious things about ritual is that it legitimizes making the same mistake over and over. So if something gets caught up in this ritual and it needs being thought of outside the box, that gets suppressed because we want to make sure that this shuttle looks exactly like it did the last time that it went up, but curves get thrown to it. This particular organizational culture is having a hard time dealing with these curves because the flexibility is not there. Because it's a culture only in the degenerate sense of that term, there is no longer a culture outside the ritual, including the ritual use of language. There's merely repetition of the phonemes. No, I don't buy that. I think there are people who are trying to think outside the box. I think that if you look back on what happened with Challenger, there were people who held their hand up and said, wait a minute, this is a new situation. We need to do something different. But they were told, don't deviate. Exactly. There were people who said that, but when they said that, they were placed outside the culture or their remarks were dismissed as outside the culture. I don't like your statement that it isn't a real culture. It is culture. This is part of what happens with culture, this ritualizing. And when it becomes too ritualized, which is the danger often with local cultures, then there can be a problem. One would hope that a disaster like Challenger would shake it up enough that there would be some mutations to the system, some other ways of looking at it. And I think that it has to a certain extent, but my fear is that it didn't change that much because they didn't, in fact, spend some time looking at the context. And I think it needs a conscientious look at the context and not just simply burying it under business as usual. And I want to point out that there's a sort of cycle going on with the way these people are socialized before they get out into the real world. They're socialized to think there is only the bureaucracy and then they get out into the real world, which in the specific case would be working for NASA or being an administrator for a public agency that oversees NASA. And let's not forget the corporate cultures for the private companies that work for NASA because that's a very much part of this problem as well. Sure. But I want to point out again that public administration programs and private administration programs may not be that similar. At least in my experience as any indicator, the problem with public administration programs is that they do feed this sort of person into a system which then becomes more like the sort of system in a self-fulfilling prophecy that they say it will be and in turn requires more similar people from the enculturation system. I think you're making an interesting assumption here and I'd like to point this out maybe as a final note. I worked for the aerospace industry for two and a half years in the late 1980s and I can tell you that there wasn't an MBA in site and management. You're talking like the MBAs came and were part of this. They weren't. Management positions were filled by engineers and they were often filled by the least competent engineers because if you were a really, really, really good engineer, you didn't get tapped for management because they wanted you designing. And so if you were a mediocre engineer, you got bumped upward so that they got you off the design team and gave you some quote-unquote training in management. So your MBA experience within this industry at least might be irrelevant. It might be considered irrelevant, but that's my point exactly. Saul's book seems to put forth that the problem with Western civilization is that management is something that is beaten into the heads of people at university after which they go out and replicate this quasi-scientific ritualistic view of it. I would say quite the opposite, management in the real world has taken as a subject of contempt as being something that anybody can do into it and go to the people who aren't competent at their current jobs. All of the Dilber principle, all of the Peter Brinsen. And I think that that approach toward management saying that it's just a place to dump people and if you want management to improve, simply dump more people into it is naive. You have been listening to first-person plural because how people get along with each other still matters. First Person Plural is a show created for community radio by Carl Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues. Music for First Person Plural is performed, composed and produced by Carl Wilkerson, except where noted. For more information about First Person Plural, Dr. Patty Thomas or Carl Wilkerson, visit our website, www.culturalconstructioncompany.com or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com.