Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies - Updated Edition

This text analyzes the social side of technological risk. It argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety, building more warnings and safeguards, fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. The author asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. By recognizing two dimensions of risk, complex versus linear interactions and tight versus loose coupling, the book provides a framework for analyzing risks and the organizations that insist on they are run.