Professionals striving for accident reduction must deal with systems in which both technical and human elements play equal and complementary roles. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant and technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity." Safety Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach describes a body of theories and data that addresses safety by drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, stressing the importance of human activity within systems. It explains in detail the central roles of social consensus and reliability and the nature of verbal reports and functional discourse. This text presents a new approach to safety management, offering a path to both greater safety and to economic savings. It presents a series of methodological tools that have proven to be reliable through extensive use in the rail and nuclear industries. These methods allow organizational and systems failures to be analyzed much more effectively in terms of quantity, precision, and usefulness. The concepts and tools described in this book are particularly valuable for reliability engineers, risk managers, human factors specialists, and safety managers and professionals in safety-critical organizations.

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 introduction to 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.

Recent work has demonstrated that incidents, accidents and disasters tend to result from complex socio-technical failures, rather than just 'human error' on the one hand, or simple technical failures on the other. For the reduction of accidents, therefore, it is necessary to deal with systems factors, in which both technical and human-factors elements play an equal and complementary role. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant/technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity". The present text describes a body of theory and data which addresses this issue squarely, drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, and which stresses the importance of human agency within systems. The central roles of social consensus and reliability, and the nature of verbal reports and 'functional discourse' are explained in some detail.

This book therefore presents a new, 'Qualitative Systems Approach' to safety management, offering both greater safety and economic savings. It presents a series of methodological 'tools' whose reliability and validity have been shown through extensive work in the rail and nuclear industries and which allow organisational and systems failures to be analysed much more effectively in terms of quantity, precision and usefulness.

This is a textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in occupational psychology, human factors, ergonomics and HCI, and the sociology of disasters and risk. It is also useful for safety managers and professionals in many safety critical firms and organisations, reliability engineers, risk managers, and human factors specialists.

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.

This book concerns the 'cognitivist' or 'information processing' approach to psychology, what it is (was?), how it originated, and whether and how desirable it is to look for ways that go beyond it. The roots of cognitivism lie deep in the history of Western thought, and to develop a genuinely post-cognitivist psychology, this investigation goes back to presuppositions descended from Platonic/Cartesian assumptions and beliefs about the nature of thought. It then tackles the practical question of how might psychologists (and linguists and philosophers) 'do' post- cognitivism? Will the psychology go on with merely the 'theoretical backdrop' changed, or will post-cognitivism require the development of new approaches and new methodologies?

Wallace demonstrates that the key claims of evolutionary psychology (EP) are based on the 'brain is a digital computer' argument. He then argues that as we now know this model of the brain will not work, EP won't work either as it is based on a fallacious view of the mind/brain.