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Organizational Learning at NASA
Mahler, Julianne G.; Casamayou, Maureen Hogan
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Description for Organizational Learning at NASA
Paperback. A study of two space shuttle accidents that offers insight into organizational learning - and what makes such learning difficult in public organizations. It suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations. Series: Public Management and Change Series. Num Pages: 256 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. BIC Classification: JPP; KJU. Category: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 18. Weight in Grams: 385.
Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy. Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning-especially in public organizations-is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA's loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2009
Publisher
Georgetown University Press United States
Number of pages
256
Condition
New
Series
Public Management and Change Series
Number of Pages
256
Place of Publication
Washington, DC, United States
ISBN
9781589012660
SKU
V9781589012660
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-50
About Mahler, Julianne G.; Casamayou, Maureen Hogan
Julianne G. Mahler is an associate professor of government and politics at George Mason University. Maureen Hogan Casamayou is a former research fellow and guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and she has taught at Georgetown University, Mount Vernon College, and George Mason University.
Reviews for Organizational Learning at NASA
Mahler and Casamayou make new and creative use of the well-studied NASA case; surface novel insights about NASA as a public organization that enhances our understanding of the subtle and complex organizational and managerial circumstances surrounding these accidents; and extend our conceptual understanding of organizational performance, reform, and change... This is a rich re-analysis of the organizational and managerial context of the Challenger and Columbia accidents... Offers a very worthwhile set of theoretical improvements and practical lessons. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory [Offers] a well-organized, lucid and informative discussion both of organizational learning theory, and of relevant case details. It provides a well-balanced and evidence-based assessment of factors facilitating or inhibiting organizational learning processes. Moreover, this book is relatively unique in its case-based effort to refine and offer hypotheses relative to existing theory, while simultaneously providing practical insights for managers. The focus on underlying processes related to organizational learning is especially helpful because it renders the framework transferable across various public sector settings or events. Given the range of ongoing public sector concerns in complex and high risk areas such as health pandemics, nuclear proliferation and testing and international relations, this book will have broad relevance and appeal. Management Learning This book deepens our understanding of the complexities of learning processes in the public service context, but it should also be useful to all scholars of organizations and organizational learning for its detailed analysis of the non-learning and unlearning that occurred between the two disasters. Administrative Science Quarterly