Understanding Society

In 1964 Jim Marshall, a defensive player for the Minnesota Vikings, committed a mistake by recovering a fumble by the San Francisco 49ers an...

Diane Vaughan's recent Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk is an important contribution to the literature on ...

A recurring theme in  Understanding Society  is the topic of technology failure -- air disasters, chemical plant explosions, deep drilling a...

Image: org chart, Housing and Urban Development (9,500 staff) Herbert Simon's important contribution to the study of administrative orga...

  Philosophy has well-developed theories about the foundations of government — the moral principles that underlie the legitimacy of governme...

The persistent fact of racial disparities in the use of deadly force by police officers in US cities is an intolerable injustice. The Washin...

A recurring topic here is the potential for large and costly failures created by the dysfunctions of complex organizations ( link ). This pe...

In my book A New Social Ontology of Government (2020) I tried to provide an analytical inventory of the sources of "dysfunctions"...

A rapidly rising percentage of the Chinese population is living in high-rise apartment buildings in hundreds of cities around the country. T...