The Challenger Launch Decision Quotes

“Bensman, Joseph, and Israel Gerver. “Crime and Punishment in the Factory: The Function of Deviancy in Maintaining the Social System.” American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 588–98.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“. “Organizations and Systematic Distortion of Information.” Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering 113 (1987): 360–70.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Becker, Howard S. “Culture: A Sociological View.” Yale Review 71 (1982): 513–28.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Barley, Stephen R. “Semiotics and the Study of Occupational and Organizational Cultures.” Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (1983): 393–413.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Alone, however, the social affirmation and commitment generated as work group decisions were processed are insufficient to explain the normalization of deviance. The culture of production and structural secrecy were environmental and organizational contingencies that caused the work group culture to persist.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“work group participants created an official cultural construction of risk that, once created, influenced subsequent choices.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“A fundamental sociological notion is that choice creates structure, which in turn feeds back, influencing choice.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“That paradigm supported a belief that was central to their worldview: the belief in redundancy.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“norms, values, and procedures that constituted a scientific paradigm.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“What is important about these three elements is that each, taken alone, is insufficient as an explanation. Combined, they constitute a nascent theory of the normalization of deviance in”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Official launch decisions accepting more and more risk were products of the production of culture in the SRB work group, the culture of production, and structural secrecy.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“its origins were in routine and taken-for-granted aspects of organizational life that created a way of seeing that was simultaneously a way of not seeing. The normalization of deviant joint performance is the answer to both questions raised at the beginning of this book: Why did NASA continue to launch shuttles prior to 1986 with a design that was not performing as predicted? Why was the Challenger launched over the objections of engineers?”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“The Challenger disaster was an accident, the result of a mistake. What is important to remember from this case is not that individuals in organizations make mistakes, but that mistakes themselves are socially organized and systematically produced. Contradicting”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“In American Technological Sublime, David Nye argues that the American reverence for technology is such that we have invested technological masterworks with transcendent, near-religious significance.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“A scientific paradigm is resistant to change. For those who adhere to its tenets, alteration requires a direct confrontation with information that contradicts it: a signal that is too clear to misperceive, too powerful to ignore.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“The belief in redundancy was the product of the work group culture and the incremental accretion of history, ideas, and routines about the booster joints that began in 1977. It was based on a scientific paradigm in the Kuhnian sense: agreed-upon procedures for inquiry, categories into which observations were fitted, and a technology including beliefs about cause-effect relations and standards of practice in relation to it. These traits, reinforced by the cultural meaning systems that contributed to its institutionalization, gave the belief in redundancy the sort of obduracy Kuhn remarked upon.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Karl Weick observes that whenever people act in a context of choice, irreversible action, and public awareness, their actions tend to become binding;9 they become committed to their actions, then develop valid, socially acceptable justifications. Committed action, justifications, and meaning become linked. Actions “mean” whatever justifications become attached to them.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“As historical ethnography, this book is intended to create a social history that reveals how participants interpreted actions and events.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“We correct history, reconstructing the past so that it will be consistent with the present, reaffirming our sense of self and place in the world. We reconstruct history every day, not to fool others but to fool ourselves, because it is integral to the process of going on.8 So we would expect that, in addition to the initial failure to register the teleconference fully, the effects of forgetting, the media effect on personal recollections, and the intentional self-protection in response to occupational risk, accounts of that evening would also be affected by the unconscious editing that goes on as people attempt to rescue order from disorder—perhaps driven in this case by a need to be guiltless, a need to have been “correct.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Peter Berger notes that the events that constitute our lives are subject to many interpretations, not just by outsiders, but by ourselves.7 When an unexpected event occurs, we need to explain it not only to others, but to ourselves.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Moreover, distortions occurred because people felt their jobs were at risk. As Marshall’s Jim Smith recounted: “A lot of people became scarce when the accident happened. It was very obvious they tried to divorce themselves from much knowledge of any facts and I guess they felt their job was going to be in jeopardy too. It was obvious people were concerned about whether they literally would lose their jobs, or be totally removed from their position and put someplace else, in a corner, or whether there would be a possibility of some legal action.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Understanding the culture, as I discovered in the first year or so of my research, is absolutely essential to understanding what went on.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Here, the chapter 1 version is repeated in boldface type, juxtaposed against another version that restores voices, actions, and details omitted from nearly all other accounts. Reconstructed in ethnographic thick description, this restoration of the confusion, diverse viewpoints, complexity of the technical issue and engineering arguments, and little-known aspects of interaction is, in itself, stereotype-shattering.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“From the early development period of the Space Shuttle through the end of 1985, the SRB work group had consistently defined the SRB joints as an acceptable risk. Behind this determination was a scientific paradigm that established the redundancy of the joint. The belief in redundancy and the scientific paradigm behind it were institutionalized prior to 1986. They were crucial components of the worldview that many decision makers brought to the teleconference on the eve of the Challenger launch.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“First, the organization of the book places the Challenger launch decision in its proper position as one decision in a decision stream begun many years before.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“both the Presidential Commission and the House Committee fully agreed on one point: “Neither NASA nor Thiokol fully understood the operation of the joint prior to the accident.”132 Commissioner Feynman observed, “The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood . . . officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the ‘success’ of previous flights.”133 Only in the wake of the tragedy was it clear they had not understood. At the end of 1985, they believed they did.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“FRR debates were governed by rules, procedures, and norms deliberately created to seek unfavorable information that challenged the decisions to accept risk and fly that were being presented: a matrix system that brought in a variety of specialists; the “fishbowl” atmosphere; proactive inquiry via “probes,” “challenges,” and Action Items; competition between projects; adversarialism; and the certification at each level that implicated all levels in the outcome.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“Bella argues that one way to combat the filtering of unfavorable information is to create checks and balances that systematically force it to surface. This strategy would also be an antidote to the ideological mind set that drives Clarke’s disqualification heuristic.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“It enables them to selectively focus on confirming information while relegating disconfirming information to secondary or even trivial status. In the Exxon Valdez case that Clarke studied, the failure to take into account information that disconfirmed beliefs about system safety led to inadequate preparation for major oil spills.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA

“According to Clarke, a disqualification heuristic is an “ideological mechanism or mind-set that leads experts and decision makers to neglect information that contradicts a conviction—in this case, a conviction that a sociotechnical system is safe.”
― Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA