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[mmdtunes17]

Final Exam Review Playlist

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Final Exam Review Playlist | Liner Notes

Bob Dylan. “Like a Rolling Stone.”  Highway 61 Revisited. Weick’s notion of the cosmology episode, in which sensemaking fails so completely that “both the sense of what is occurring and the means to rebuild that sense collapse together,” is how it feels, as Bob Dylan sings, “to be on your own / with no direction home.” The song also demonstrates the benefits of “throwing down your tools” -- its debut marked Dylan’s transition from folk singer to rock singer, an innovation that ultimately cemented his status as a legend of 20th century music.

Nick Drake. “Which Will.” Pink Moon. Perrow suggests two “models of man”: the rational decision-maker, and the intendedly rational decision-maker (“intended rationality” being used interchangeably with “bounded rationality”). Which will you choose, when it comes to choosing a model of how we choose? As Perrow notes, “Bounded rationality... creates a great deal of change, for it permits unexpected interactions, new discoveries, serendipities, and new goals and values. Given that we are not superhuman, our very limitations make us human in ways that we should treasure." (Perrow 1986, p123).

Cat Power [Mick Jagger / Keith Richards]. “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction.” The Covers Record. Lindblom, in “The Science of Muddling Through,” argues that decision makers can’t get the satisfaction of a full rational comparison of possible options, because resources are always limited and information always imperfect. Their environment is always clouded, as Cat Power sings here, by “some useless information / trying to mess my imagination.” Instead they resort to “satisficing,” or muddling through to the nearest acceptable solution through a series of successive limited comparisons (as Cat Power does: “he can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke / the same cigarettes as me”.)

Walter Martin. “Jobs I Had Before I Got Rich & Famous.” Arts & Leisure. People low in organizational hierarchies sometimes exercise surprisingly expansive power, thanks to their direct access to resources, information, and people. Walter Martin calls out to each of these in the crappy jobs he held before getting rich and famous: Pizza delivery boys stealing from the box; redirecting incoming calls for the director of the Metropolitan Museum to his sleeping roommate; encountering Billy Joel from behind an information desk as he enters the Cloisters.

Lana Del Rey [Nina Simone]. “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” Honeymoon. The “good men” of the heavy electrical equipment industry were anxious to preserve the image of their propriety even while being convicted of running a criminal price-fixing conspiracy in the 1960s. In their arguments that they were virtuous actors carrying out the conspiracy under pressure from their superiors and the wider corporate culture, you can almost hear Lana Del Ray singing “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good -- oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” But, as Gies notes, “A crime is a crime is a crime” (Gies 2002, p116).

Adele. “Hello.” Hello. Disasters often erupt after a long incubation period during which they throw off warning signals. These signals might be weak, mixed, misinterpreted or ignored. NASA engineers for example confronted by inconsistent evidence of O-ring erosion in the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters misinterpreted these warning signs of a malfunction that would destroy the shuttle Challenger shortly after launch.  Think of signals like these as Adelle, singing  “Hello from the outside ... / I must have called a thousand times ... / but when I call you never seem to be home.”

Elliott Smith. “Somebody That I Used To Know.” Figure 8. Pfeffer and Salancik argue that organizations are vulnerable to influence from external organizations to the extent that they are dependent on exchanges of resources (transactions) with those organizations. It’s a concept with which Elliott Smith might be familiar, singing about someone who “don’t need my help any more ... / now that you’re big enough to run your own show / you’re just somebody that I used to know.”

Joe Cocker [John Lennon / Paul McCartney]. “With a Little Help from my Friends.” With a Little Help from my Friends. “Any organization may be faced by the action of a member which embarrasses the organization,” Katz writes (Katz 1977, p6). It could be a slight deviance, like the mistake of “singing out of tune,” or a more sinister act of fraud or abuse. Organizations can sanction deviant members, or cover up the deviance, shielding it from critical outsiders. Coverups, Kats argues, are ways of increasing internal cohesion and authority by helping deviant members “get by with a little help from my friends.”

Joan Jett [Angus Young et al]. “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Hughes, writing about the riddle of the “good Germans” who stood by as the holocaust was carried out, argues that “The crucial question concerning the good people is their relation to the people who did the dirty work, with a related one which asks under what circumstances good people let the others get away with such actions.” The answer, in part, is that people in every organization and society always delegate “dirty work” to others who will, as Joan Jett sings here, get them “done dirt cheap.” The question isn’t why 

The Long Winters. “The Commander Thinks Aloud.” Ultimatum. As far as we can tell this is the only pop song explicitly about a space shuttle disaster -- in this case, the loss of the Columbia on re-entry over Texas in 2003. As professor Vaughan covered in lecture, the Columbia accident in significant ways resulted from the same failed acceptable risk process that doomed the Challenger on launch. The Presidential Commission investigating the Challenger accident ultimately blamed technical failures combined with a failure of management, and reacted by removing “amoral” managers, while leaving the flawed organizational system in place. This is a key lesson of the course: focusing on the failures of individuals in a disaster while ignoring structural causes leaves open the possibility of a repeat disaster.    

Radiohead. “Present Tense.” A Moon Shaped Pool. The 9/11 Commission, describing the attitude of US policymakers, wrote that in the 1990s, “to us, Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of al Qaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were” (9/11 Commission, p340). In other words the failure of imagination of the US defense establishment could be described in this way as a mistaken belief that, as Thom Yorke singe here, “Distance” (this dance? The ambiguity is productive) “is like a weapon / of self defense / against the present tense.”

Moondog. “Do Your Thing.” H’art Songs. No course significance here, except that it’s almost summer we wanted to send you off with this sage advice about being yourselves.

[mmdtunes17]

Midterm Review playlist

[mmdtunes17]

Midterm Playlist | Liner notes

Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “It’s Your Last Chance to Dance.” Made in New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions. This recording of a party-closing classic by New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band took on a darker second meaning after Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans and flooded historic Preservation Hall in 2005.   

The Kinks. “20th Century Man.” Muswell Hillbillies. Coleman argued that starting in the 20th century society became dominated by corporate actors. Individuals are irrelevant to this new, powerful corporate person, except insofar as they are agents acting in the corporate actor's interest. It is, as Ray Davies sings here, a society "ruled by bureaucracy, controlled by civil servants and people dressed in grey."

Yo La Tengo. “Automatic Doom.” Automatic Doom. Normal accidents are normal in that they are inevitable outcomes of the routine operation of complex, tightly coupled systems. You might say normal accidents are an automatic doom waiting for systems like these.

Rhianna. “Complicated.” Loud. Interactive complexity is a key factor of normal accidents. Sometimes you get the system, sometimes you just don’t understand. Imagine Rhianna singing this song to the nuclear power plant at Indian Point.

Dr. John. “Right Place Wrong Time.” In The Right Place. Dr. John is a complex, loosely coupled man in a linear and tightly coupled world, where there is deep trouble to be found in being in the right place at the wrong time; in saying the right thing, but using the wrong line.

Ben Solee. “The Long Lavender Line (feat. Jordon Ellis).” Infowars. This ballad to the mistakes people make while following GPS directions and playing Pokémon highlights the ways we go wrong while acting while pursuing organizational goals.

The Velvet Underground. “Temptation Inside Your Heart.” The Velvet Underground. Lou Reed might be right that the temptation lies inside your heart. But when that temptation is pursued from one’s official position in an organization and in pursuit of organization goals, that’s misconduct.

Gillian Welch. “Ruination Day Part 2.” Time (The Revelator). April 14 marks the anniversary of three disasters: the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935, one of the worst dust storms of the “dust bowl” that pushed hundreds of thousands of refugees from the great plains west towards California. This trio of disasters - accident, terrorism, and natural disaster, all fall into types considered by Turner and Pidgeon. They argue that the line between "natural" and "man-made" disaster is increasingly blurred by increasing human intervention in the natural environment.

Tom Waits. “The Piano Has Been Drinking [Not me]”. Small Change. The core insight in the concept of social-technical systems is that when we use technical tools, they are in a way using us too: our action is shaped by the characteristics of the material objects we use. Tom Waits brings this idea to its absurd extreme in this song.

The War on Drugs. “Under The Pressure.” Lost in the Dream. In Weick’s account of Tenerife air disaster we learn that people often return to their first-learned behaviors when they are under pressure, and that this was a key factor in the Tenerife crash. Tight coupling generates high pressure for optimal performance of components and operators of any system.

Daft Punk, Panda Bear. “Doin’ it Right.” Random Access Memories. Something about socialization. Socialization into an organization has worked when, as Daft Punk say, everybody is dancing and doing it right; when you lose your way (your pre-existing individual disposition) that’s how you know the magic of socialization is right. Beware sources of variation in socialization.

The Go! Team. “Hold Yr Terror Close.” The Power is On. One key trait of High Reliability Organizations is a preoccupation with failure or near misses and methodically learning from those incidents in ways that strengthen the organization. That’s also the theme of this Go Team song (“Learning to be you is what hurts most / close your eyes and hold your terror close”).

Jonnie Frierson. “Have You Been Good To Yourself.” Have You Been Good to Yourself. There’s no course-related message here, except that it’s midterm time and we hope you are being good to yourself.