Diane Vaughan

Building explanations from data is an important but usually invisible process behind all published research. Here I reconstruct my theorizing for an historical ethnography of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and the NASA (National Aeronautical and Space Administration) decisions that produced that accident. I show how analogical theorizing, a method that compares similar events or activities across different social settings, leads to more refined and generalizable theoretical explanations. Revealing the utility of mistakes in theorizing, I show how my mistakes uncovered mistakes in the documentary record, converting my analysis to a revisionist account that contradicted the conventional explanation accepted at the time. Retracing how I developed the concepts and theory that explained the case demonstrates the connection between historic political and economic forces, organization structure and processes, and cultural understandings and actions at NASA. Finally, these analytic reflections show how analysis, writing, and theorizing are integrated throughout the research process.

When scientific and technical work goes on within a formal organization, what effect, if any, does the organizational setting have on the production of facts and artefacts? This question has not yet been thoroughly explored in science and technology studies. Organizations are meso-level structures: located between the macro-level contingencies and the micro-level interactions that are known to affect the interpretive work of scientific and technical experts, organizations also play an important rôle. To encourage discussion about the rôle of organizations in knowledge production processes, I first draw on organization theory to demonstrate the ironic fact that organizations, necessary to produce, coordinate and maintain complex techno-scientific systems, also have irreducible and emergent effects on the way complex information is transmitted, communicated, processed and stored. Then, to illustrate empirically how organizations affect knowledge processes in the workplace, I reconsider data on engineering decisions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), presenting a new interpretation that focuses on the rôle of the organization in knowledge production. In combination, organization theory and the empirical analysis suggest that certain structures, processes and transaction forms are generic across organizational settings, having ramifications for knowledge production by technologists and scientists in a variety of knowledge sites. In conclusion, I frame this discussion within the traditions of science and technology studies, suggesting the integrative, theory-building potential of future research that takes into account formal organizations as contemporary machineries of knowing.