Charles Perrow

Biography

American sociologist (1925–2019) and a leading figure in organizational sociology. He taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Wisconsin–Madison and SUNY Stony Brook before joining Yale University in 1981, where he became emeritus in 2000; in 2004 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (1972) remains his most widely cited work. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Basic Books, 1984) took the 1979 Three Mile Island accident as its point of departure and proposed two dimensions—complex versus linear interactions and tight versus loose coupling—to explain the structure of high-risk systems, arguing that in complex, tightly coupled systems with catastrophic potential, unforeseen combinations of multiple failures are inevitable, which he called normal accidents. Princeton University Press issued an updated edition in 1999 with an afterword on Bhopal, Chernobyl and Challenger. The Next Catastrophe (2007) extended the analysis to natural disasters and the risks of concentrated critical infrastructure. A Chinese translation appeared in 1988 from Scientific and Technical Documents Press under the collective translator name Han Chuang.