Publications

"Iran Air Flight 655: Complex, Large-Scale Military Systems and the Failure of Control." Responding to Large Technical Systems: Control or Anticipation. Ed. R. Mayntz and T.R. La Porte (Amsterdam: Kluwer, 1991), 95-121.

"The Gulf War: Technological and Organizational Implications" (with Chris C. Demchak). Survival, 33, No. 3 (May/June 1991), 260-273. Reprinted (in Hebrew) in Maarachot, Journal of the Israeli Defense Forces, No. 323 (March 1992), 22-31.

"Contributions of the Social Sciences: How, What, When, Why, and Who?" Energy Policies to Address Climate Change (Berkeley: Universitywide Energy Research Group, University of California, 1991), 377-398. (Proceedings of the Conference on Global Warming and Energy Policy, Davis, California, Sept. 7, 1989: Energy Research and the Social Sciences, (In Press, 2014).

"Lessons of the Gulf War: Tough New Technology May Have Fragile Underpinnings." IGS Public Affairs Report, 32, No. 6 (Nov. 1991), 10-12.

Lessons of the Gulf War: Ascendant Technology and Declining Capability (with Chris C. Demchak). Policy Papers in International Relations, No. 39 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1991).

"Defining High-Reliability Organizations in Practice: A Definitional Prolegomenon." In K. H. Roberts, ed., New Challenges to Understanding Organizations (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 11-32.

"Essential Friction: Error Control in Organizational Behavior." In Nordal Akerman, ed., The Necessity of Friction (Heidelberg: Springer/Physica-Verlag, 1993), 196-234.

"Global Climate Change as Political Expedient: Impending Doom or Another Excuse for Doing 'Good Things?' In Julia Trilling and Steinar Strøm, eds., Global Climate Change: European and American Policy Responses (Berkeley: Center for Western European Studies, University of California and Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1993).

"Broken Plowshare: System Failure and the Nuclear Power Industry." In Jane Summerton, ed., Changing Large Technical Systems (Boulder, CO.: Westview, 1994), 231-264.

"Nuclear Power Operations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" (with Alexandra von Meier). Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, 19 (1994), 153-187.

"Nuclear Technology and Social Culture." Proceedings of the Second MIT Conference on the Next Generation of Nuclear Power Technology, MIT-ANP-CP-002, (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994), 7:11-7:24.

"False Dichotomies and Limits to Testing: A Strawman Speaks Up, Comments on Limits to Safety" (with T.R. La Porte). Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 3, No. 4 (Dec. 1994) 221-228.

"Empirical Studies of the Operation of Complex Systems: Cultural Approaches and Social-Anthropological Perspectives." Proceedings of the 1994 Symposium on Human Interaction with Complex Systems, (NCA&T University, Greensboro, N.C., 1995), 407-417.

"Reliable Organizations: Present Research and Future Directions," Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 4, No. 2 (June 1996), 55-59. (Guest editor of this issue).

"Pris dans la toile: réseaux, mutations et conformité à l'ère de l'informatique" (Trapped in the Web: Networking, transformation, and conformance in the information age), Flux, no. 22, Octobre-Dé'cembre 1995, 17-30.

“Human Operators as Organizational Trash Collectors,” Technology Studies, 3, No. 2 (Summer 1997), 276-282.

"The Social Construction of Safety." In Bernhard Wilpert, J. Misumi, and R. Miller, eds., Nuclear Safety: A Human Factors Perspective (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998), 5-23.

"Safe Operation as a Social Construct." Ergonomics, 42, No. 3 (Fall 1999), 1-12.

"Two-Thousand-N: An IT Odyssey." Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 7, No. 4 (December 1999), 199-214.

"An Ecological Approach to the Study of Highly-reliable Organizations," Proceedings of the XIVth Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, San Diego California (August 2000), Vol. 3, D5.

"A Rational Choice of Error: Comments on the JCO Accident Report." Cognition, Technology and Work, 2 (Summer 2000), 232-234.

"Les Organisations 'Hautement Fiables': Bilan et Perspectives de Recherche." In Mathilde Bourrier, ed., Organiser la Fiabilité, Coll. Risques collectifs et situations de crise ( Paris, l'Harmattan, 2001), 24-58.

"Future IT Disasters: A Speculative Exploration," Chapter 15 of From Contingencies to Crisis Management: A Ten Year Review ( Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2001), 251-266.

"Networks and the Subversion of Choice: An Institutionalist Manifesto." Journal of Urban Technology 8, no. 3 (2001): 65-96.

"Les réseaux et la subversion du choix: un manifeste institutionaliste." FLUX: Cahiers scientifiques inernationaux Réseaux et Territoires 47 (2002): 35-53.

"Safety as a social construct: the problem(atique) of agency."In Jane Summerton and Boel Berner, eds., Constructing Risk and Safety in Technological Practice ( London: Routledge, 2002), 123-139.

"Mind the Gap: The Growing Distance Between Institutional and Technical Capabilities in Organizations Performing Critical Operations." In Hsinchun Chen, Reagan Moore, Daniel D. Zeng, and John Leavitt, eds., Intelligence and Security Informatics ( New York: Springer, 2004), 349-358.

“How to Hunt a Very Reliable Organization.” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 19, no. 1 (2011): 14-20.

"Integrating social science in energy research." Sovacool, B.K., Ryan, S.E., Stern, P.C., Janda, K., Rochlin, G., Spreng, D., Pasqualetti, M.J., Wilhite, H., Lutzenhiser, L. Energy Research and Social Science, vol. 6, ( 2015): 95 - 99.

Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. (paperback August 1998).