Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy. Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning—especially in public organizations—is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA’s loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.
Between 1990 and 1993, breast cancer activism became a significant political movement. The issue began to receive extensive media attention, and federal funding for breast cancer research jumped dramatically. Describing the origins of this surge in interest, Maureen Hogan Casamayou attributes it to the emergence of politically potent activism among breast cancer survivors and their supporters. Exploring the creation and development of the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC), she shows how many of its key leaders were mobilized by their own traumatic experiences with the disease and its treatments. Casamayou details the NBCC’s meteoric rise and impressive lobbying efforts, explaining how—in contrast to grassroots movements founded by dedicated individuals—the coalition grew from the simultaneous efforts of a network of women who invested their time, energy, money, and professional skills in the fight for increased funding for breast cancer research. This multiple leadership—or collective entrepreneurialism, says Casamayou—was crucial to the NBCC’s success framing the issue in the minds of the public and policymakers alike.
How bureaucracies perceive and respond to technological risk is the subject of this study in organizational theory. The author offers evidence from primary sources such as the testimony of agency officials; agency memoranda; and extensive interviews in Congress, the bureaucracy, and the White House to explain the organizational failures leading to the Three Mile Island and Challenger accidents. She examines the implications of these organizational failures in terms of how organizations communicate about and cope with potential risks to public safety-in hopes of avoiding such disasters in the future.
How bureaucracies perceive and respond to technological risk is the subject of this study in organizational theory. The author offers evidence from primary sources such as the testimony of agency officials; agency memoranda; and extensive interviews in Congress, the bureaucracy, and the White House to explain the organizational failures leading to the Three Mile Island and Challenger accidents. She examines the implications of these organizational failures in terms of how organizations communicate about and cope with potential risks to public safety-in hopes of avoiding such disasters in the future.
Between 1990 and 1993, breast cancer activism became a significant political movement. The issue began to receive extensive media attention, and federal funding for breast cancer research jumped dramatically. Describing the origins of this surge in interest, Maureen Hogan Casamayou attributes it to the emergence of politically potent activism among breast cancer survivors and their supporters. Exploring the creation and development of the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC), she shows how many of its key leaders were mobilized by their own traumatic experiences with the disease and its treatments. Casamayou details the NBCC’s meteoric rise and impressive lobbying efforts, explaining how—in contrast to grassroots movements founded by dedicated individuals—the coalition grew from the simultaneous efforts of a network of women who invested their time, energy, money, and professional skills in the fight for increased funding for breast cancer research. This multiple leadership—or collective entrepreneurialism, says Casamayou—was crucial to the NBCC’s success framing the issue in the minds of the public and policymakers alike.
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