Reliable Organizations and Institutional Failures

Rochlin was one of the founders of the collaborative trans-national scholarly group on the history, development, and performance of large-scale technical organizations, with a particular emphasis on those that embed complex technologies whose support and development structures transcend organizational boundaries. Of particular interest have been those that perform safety-critical operations – historically air traffic control and military systems, and he continues to collaborate on projects addressing these matters.

His most recent explorations concern the effects of rapidly developing, extensive, and often very costly technical developments on the increasingly trans-boundary interconnections of medical practices and hospitals. Although the economic implications of this emergent reconstruction of medical systems for individual and systemic reliability have been extensively studied, very little attention has been paid to date on the effect on system reliability and failures.

Work also continues on collaboration with the extended group of scholars who focus on organizational reliability and institutional performance in the case of disruption and disasters. Of late, their has been a growing body of literature on “resilient engineering.” Is this an oxymoron? Or are there reasons for believing that resilience in engineering per se can compensate for organizational defects and institutional failures?

Managing Nuclear Waste and Plutonium

Future cooperation is planned with the Department of History and the Office for the History of Technology and Science at UC Berkeley on the historical development of the U.S. nuclear waste program. This is based inter-alia on historical papers gathered by Rochlin and others at Berkeley, and on other personal memoirs and papers as well as official histories.