Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies Quotes.

1. "example of a phenomenon that will concern us in this chapter: production pressures in this high-risk system."
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies

2. "The nuclear power industry, for example, lacks a strong union, has random public victims with delayed effects, has no safety board that is independent of licensing and regulatory functions, and does not see an immediate effect on its profits if safety flags (though a far more severe incentive exists to avoid a catastrophic accident which could shut down the industry)."
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies

3. "Unfortunately, the technological fixes have frequently only enabled those who run the commercial airlines, the general aviation community, and the military to run greater risks in search of increased performance."
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies

4. "Edwards continues by arguing that all this automation has not reduced the workload of the pilot a great deal; instead, it has increased the operational effectiveness of the system."
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies

5. "workload has become more bunched, with long periods of inactivity and short bursts of intense activity. Both of these are error-inducing modes of operation."
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies

6. "Engineers speak of a control loop, in which the man in the loop is the problematical element. This is the human component in a series of sequentially interacting pieces of equipment that control or adjust a function. But when the pilot is suddenly and unexpectedly brought into the control loop (in other words, participates in decision making) as a result of (inevitable) equipment failure, he is disoriented. Long periods of passive monitoring make one unprepared to act in emergencies. The sudden appearance of several alarms, all there for safety reasons, leads to disorientation."
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies

7. "Unfortunately, most warning systems do not warn us that they can no longer warn us.)"
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies

8. "Organizational theorists, at least since Burns and Stalker, 1961 and Joan Woodward, 1965 in what came to be called the contingency school, have recognized that centralization is appropriate for organizations with routine tasks, and decentralization for those with nonroutine tasks."
- Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies