A ground-breaking new book, Beyond Human Error: Taxonomies and
Safety Science deconstructs the conventional concept of "human
error" and provides a whole new way of looking at accidents and how
they might be prevented. Based on research carried out in the rail,
nuclear, and defense industries, the authors show how, by
concentrating solely on "human error," systems and sociological
factors are frequently ignored in contemporary safety science. They
also argue that the "information processing" view of human
cognition, the foundation of the majority of safety science and
ergonomics, is hopelessly simplistic and leads to ineffective or
even misguided intervention strategies.
Wallace and Ross explore how what they call the "technically
rational" view of science can hamper the process of creating a
taxonomy of error events, and the implications this has for the
current orthodoxy. In laying out the limitations of the
"technically rational" viewpoint, they clearly define their own
alternative approach. They begin by demonstrating that the creation
of reliable taxonomies is crucial and provide examples of how they
created such taxonomies in the nuclear and rail industries. They go
on to offer a critique of conventional "frequentist" statistics and
provide coherent, easy to use alternatives. They conclude by
re-analyzing infamous disasters such as theSpace Shuttle Challenger
accident to demonstrate how the "standard" view of these events
ignores social and distributed factors. The book concludes with a
stimulating and provocative description of the implications of this
new approach for safety science, and the social sciences as a
whole.
While providing a clear and intelligible introductionto the
theory of human error and contemporary thinking in safety science,
Wallace and Ross mount a challenge to the old orthodoxy and provide
a practical alternative paradigm.
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