The seriousness, potential dimensions, and likely victims of the AIDS epidemic were known as early as 1981, yet the reaction of public and private organizations was shockingly slow and feeble and is even now woefully inadequate. Basing their analysis largely on the hardest hit city, New York, Charles Perrow and Mauro Guillen deliver a passionate, yet well-documented indictment of governmental and private groups for failing to provide the necessary education and care in response to this disaster. In this controversial book the authors describe the patterns of denial, avoidance, and...
The seriousness, potential dimensions, and likely victims of the AIDS epidemic were known as early as 1981, yet the reaction of public and private org...
Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk--complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling--this book provides a...
Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to en...
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics...
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working populat...
A classic text in sociology, Complex Organizations provides a succinct overview of the principal schools of thought of organizational theories, placing each into critical, historical, and cultural context. Vividly written, with many specific, student-oriented examples, Complex Organizations offers a critical perspective on organizations, analyzing their impact on individuals, groups, and society as a whole.
Charles Perrow's cogent examination of organizational theory has bridged the gap between two academic disciplines, sociology and business administration, and has...
A classic text in sociology, Complex Organizations provides a succinct overview of the principal schools of thought of organizational theori...
