Diane Vaughan is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Her interests are organization theory, cultural sociology, historical ethnography, historical sociology, organizations, work, and technology, and science, knowledge, and technology. Her books are Controlling Unlawful Organizational Behavior, Uncoupling, The Challenger Launch Decision, and Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk (fall, 2021). Over time, she has developed the method of analogical theorizing, looking for similarities and differences across cases. In sequential cross-case comparison across the four books, the Challenger and Dead Reckoning cases provided data across three levels of analysis, making it possible to identify system effects: the relation between institutions, organizations, culture and cognition. Both cases are historical ethnographies of the workplace within complex socio-technical systems, and both show changes across time and space and how the past materializes in the present. However, the dynamics and outcomes are very different. Challenger shows a top-down model in which actions and changes in the institutional environment, changed the organizational system, affecting the workplace, work and decision making, perpetuating a complex culture that disempowered workers, resulting in a harmful outcome, Although the air traffic control system is subject to the same external influences and effects, the analysis shows agency and change initiated from the bottom up. The two in combination add to the literature on institutional persistence and change, boundaries and boundary work, and culture and cognition.
