The Fukushima Accident: The Limits of Organizational Control of Risk Technologies

Jost Halfmann
Additional contact information
Jost Halfmann: Institute of Sociology, Technical University Dresden

International Journal of Applied and Physical Sciences, 2015, vol. 1, issue 1, 22-26

Abstract: The failures of organization which run high technologies can be related to the fragile complexity of these organizations. Fragility is to mean here that the selectivity of decisions in organizations implies systematic non-knowledge about a multitude of events inside and outside the organization. It is for this reason that failures appear as surprises. It is not only the control of hazardous technologies which demands particular forms of alertness, it is also the selective preparedness for surprises which make these organizations accident-prone. The Fukushima accident resulted not simply from mismanagement, but from selective decisions about necessary and seemingly sufficient safety measures which, however, did not process enough available knowledge about possible environmental events threatening the operations of the power plants

Keywords: Fukushima Accident; Organizational Control; Risk Technologies; hazardous Technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://kkgpublications.com/applied-sciences-article4/ (application/pdf)
https://kkgpublications.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/IJAPS-50004.pdf (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:apa:ijapss:2015:p:22-26

DOI: 10.20469/IJAPS.50004

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Applied and Physical Sciences is currently edited by Dr K.Vivehananthan

More articles in International Journal of Applied and Physical Sciences from Dr K.Vivehananthan Calle Alarcon 66, Sant Adrian De Besos 08930, Barcelona Spain.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr K.Vivehananthan ().