Abstract
In his article ‘Better Communication Between Engineers and Managers: Some Ways to Prevent Many Ethically Hard Choices’1 Michael Davis analyzes the causes of the disaster in terms of a communications gap between management and engineers. When the communication between (representatives of) both groups breaks down, the organization is in (moral) trouble. Crucial information gets stuck somewhere in the organization prohibiting a careful discussion and weighing of all (moral) arguments. The resulting judgment has therefore little (moral) quality. In this paper I would like to comment on some of Michael Davis’s interesting and thought-provoking insights and ideas. A company which implements Davis’s recommendations at least shows some sensitivity to organizational moral issues. But it might miss the point that moral trouble can also result from a common understanding between managers and engineers. Organizational members sometimes tend to be myopic with regard to safety issues. This paper:
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describes different meanings of safety Managers and engineers, as Davis mentions, are sometimes willing to compromise quality, but do sacrifice safety. It is my contention that safety—in the sense of putting people’s lives on the line—will always be compromised, and that the discussion is about the ways to negotiate the risks./li
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focuses on a shared understanding of the situation and its implications for safety Using examples from a case study I did on behalf of a commercial airline,2 I will try to show that it is not always the communications gap between managers and engineers which poses a risk to the stakeholders involved, but a common understanding of the situation.
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focuses on a ‘timely concatenation of both active and latent failures’ as a cause for accidents I will argue that—in spite of our efforts to strengthen ethical consciousness and organizational practices—there will always be accidents. They are part of the human condition, since we cannot completely control the complexity of the situations in which they occur. One can, however, make them less costly.
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Notes and References
Davis, M. (1997) Better Communication Between Engineers and Managers: Some Ways to Prevent Many Ethically Hard Choices, Science and Engineering Ethics 3: 171–212.
Hummels, H. (1996) Vluchtige Arbeid, EBURON, Deft.
See Starbuck, W.H. & Milliken, F.J. (1988) Challenger: Fine-Tuning the Odds until Something Break, Journal of Management Studies 25: 319–340, and Feynman, R. (1988) An outsider’s inside view of the Challenger inquiry. Physics Today (February, 1988): 26–37.
Thiokol’s engineers said that NASA should not launch the shuttle if the ambient temperature was below 53 degrees, because no previous launch had occurred with an ambient temperature below 53 degrees (Starbuck and Milliken (1988),3 p. 330).
See Starbuck, W.H. and Milliken, F. J. (1988)3: p. 330.
cf. Perrow, C. (1984) Normal accidents. Living with High-Risk Technologies, Basic Books, New York and Perrow, C. (1986) Complex Organizations, Random House, New York.
See Davis, M. 19971.
Miller, C.O. (1988) System Safety. In: Wiener, E.L. & Nagel, D.C., Human Factors in Aviation, Academic Press, San Diego.
Tench, W.H., (1985) Safety is no accident, Collins, London.
quoted in Miller, C.O. (1988)8 p. 54.
cf. Perrow, C. (1984)6 Miller (1988);8 and Sagan, S.D. (1994) Toward a Political Theory of Organizational Reliability. In: Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 2: 228–240.
Collins, R.L. (1986) Air Crashes, MacMillan, New York.
quoted in Miller, C.O. (1988)8.
Nader, R. & W.J. Smith, (1994) Collision course. The Truth About Airline Safety, TAB Books, Blue Ridge Summit, PA.
Miller, C.O. (1988)8 p. 78.
Wood, R.H. (1991) Aviation Safety Programs. A Management Handbook, IAP Inc., Casper WY.
Miller, C.O. (1988)8 p. 73.
Nader, R. and W. J. Smith (1994)14 p. 18.
Wood, R.H. (1991)16 p. 17.
Starbuck, W.H. & Milliken, F.J. (1988)3: p. 333.
ibid:: 334.
Discussions may rise as a result of different interpretations of the ‘faults’ that have been detected. The Challenger as a whole incorporated over 8000 components that have been classified Criticality 1, 2 or 3. “It had 829 components that were officially classified as Criticality 1 or 1R [R is for Redundancy, HH] - 748 of them classified 1 rather than 1R. Each SRB had 213 of these “critical items’, 114 of which were classified 1” (Starbuck and Milliken, (1988)3: 334).
Starbuck & Milliken (1988)3,: 334.
ibid:: 330.
Schön, D.A. (1983) The Reflective Practioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Basic Books, p.49,50
There are a variety of reasons why ground engineers are engineers and not simple technicians. First, in his phenomenological analysis Whalley Whalley, P. (1986) The social production of Technical Work: the Case of British Engineers, Macmillan, London) argues that engineers can be distinguished from junior technical staff and from craft workers by the degree of trust and discretion bestowed on them by management. Ground-engineers—much more than the specialized engineers occupied in staff functions—have authority to release the aircraft to service. Second, following McGovern (McGovern, P. (1996) The division of technical labour. In: Work, Employment & Society 10 (1): 85–103) who empirically evaluated the difference between engineers and other technicians, two dimensions are relevant in distinguishing engineers from technicians. These dimensions are: the firm-related implications of the work itself and the location of the individual within the firm’s structure of authority. With regard to the first dimension the engineers not only represent and bind the entire company when releasing an aircraft to service, they are also required to do the necessary administrative work. They have to write reports and sign their ‘Bill of Work’. With regard to the second dimension, ground engineers often have more authority than the managers they report to. Only in case of serious trouble—when an engineer is not able to dispatch an aircraft in time because of a technical fault—are they required to contact their manager. In other words, they manage their own work. In addition, the special high level education and training ground engineers receive is another argument for qualifying them as engineers and not as regular technicians.
See Hummels, H., Vluchtige Arbeid, Delft, 1996a; Hummels, H., Business ethics and the process of organizing. In: Gasparski W.W. & L.V. Ryan (eds.), Human Action in Business, Praxiology and Ethical Dimensions, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1996b; and Hummels, H., Ethics and the development of work: the Central Maintenance Computer case. In: Natale, S.M. & Fenton M.B. (eds.), (1997) Business Education and Training: a Value-Laden Process, vol. 3, University Press of America, Lanham.
The book was translated in English in 1992 and published as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, London.
Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society, Sage, London, p. 29.
ibid: 34.
ibid: 21.
Nader and Smith (1995)14, p. 259.
Miller, C.O. (1988),8 p. 62.
Lederer, J. (1989) The Devil’s Advocate—Some Social and Economic Safety Problems Facing Airline Managers. In: Flight Safety Digest 8: 1–5.
Reason, J. (1990) Human Error; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, p.173.
ibid:, p.173.
Beck (1992),33 p. 33.
ibid: p. 33.
Maurino, D.E., et al. (1995) Beyond Aviation Human Factors, Avebury Aviation, Aldershot, UK.
Beck, U. (1992),33 p. 28.
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Hummels, H. Ethical challenges in a technological environment: The perspective of engineers versus managers. SCI ENG ETHICS 5, 55–72 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-999-0062-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-999-0062-1