Interpreting the Challenger disaster: communication under conditions of risk and liability

1 September 1988

journal article
Published by SAGE Publications in Industrial Crisis Quarterly

Vol. 2 (3-4) , 211-227
https://doi.org/10.1177/108602668800200303

Abstract

This research is a case study of the events following the Challenger accident and focuses on the way in which members of NASA before the accident and the Presidential Commission following the accident acted in ways to protect the survival of NASA as a viable agency. The central theme of the strategies of protection was to localize the blame to individuals at lower levels in NASA and to fix blame on a communications failure (a technical problem) rather than blaming the leadership of NASA (an institutional problem). In its conclusion the article addresses the issues involved in crossing entrepreneurial cultures that include risk and high technology with bureaucratic cultures that are safe and procedural.

Keywords

This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit:

Chains of Command: Responsibility Attribution in Hierarchies¹
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1986
Ambiguity as strategy in organizational communication
Communication Monographs, 1984
A Structurationist Account of Political Culture
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1983
Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1981
The Structuring of Organizational Structures
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1980
Status Degradation and Organizational Succession: An Ethnomethodological Approach
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1978
The Organizational and Interorganizational Development of Disasters
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1976
Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1976
Causal chains: Attribution of responsibility as a function of immediate and prior causes.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1975
A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice
Administrative Science Quarterly, 1972