Organizational failure — upcoming video seminar

 Here is an interesting opportunity to do some thinking about the ways that organizational features create hazards for technology systems at many levels…

Dear problem-solving community Please join us on Friday, May 15, 11AM Eastern time (17:00 CET), at this Zoom Link for a problem-solving coffee hour with Catino Maurizio (University of Milano-Bicocca) on “Solving the scapegoat problem in organizations.”  Abstract: When a large cruise ship sinks after hitting rocks near the shore, public debate quickly turns to a fundamental question: who is to blame? In the aftermath of negative events—accidents, corporate scandals, crises, and bankruptcies—organizations typically adopt one of two blame management strategies. The first consists in acknowledging responsibility and implementing structural corrective measures. The second involves constructing one or more scapegoats by shifting blame onto individuals directly involved in the event. By personalizing failure, the organization can appear structurally sound and avoid costly reforms. Revisiting the Costa Concordia shipwreck, this talk analyzes the organizational processes and mechanisms through which the “organizational scapegoat” is produced. It shows how individualized accounts of guilt transform systemic problems into moral failures, thereby protecting organizational arrangements from scrutiny. From the perspective of problem-solving sociology, scapegoating represents the opposite of a genuinely problem-oriented approach. While scapegoating closes the problem by locating it in deviant individuals, problem-solving sociology seeks to reopen the analysis at the organizational level, asking how structures, routines, and decision processes made the failure possible. The talk argues that moving beyond blame-centered narratives is a necessary step toward developing a civic epistemology capable of addressing organizational responsibility in complex systems.A Virtual Coffee Hour is an informal discussion of issues that arise in problem-solving research.  For more information and the upcoming schedule, see here. To present at a virtual coffee hour, sign up here. Please forward this to others who may be interested.  (If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe to our mailing list from the problem-solving sociology website.) Problem-Solving Sociology Network

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