``High-Reliability'' Organizations and Technical Change: Some Ethical Problems and Dilemmas

We consider here three exemplary ``high-reliability'' organizations that perform complex, highly technical, time-urgent tasks upon which many people depend for their safety and well-being. Faced with demands to increase capacity without reducing reliability or increasing operational staff, all there are on the verge of introducing new and advanced technologies to increase system capacity without sacrificing safety or reliability. Yet, few of those involved in engineering the changes understand why these organizations perform as well as they do, or how the structure of the organization will be altered by the incorporation of radically new technologies. This raises a number of ethical problems for system administrators and engineers who are effectively implementing changes in organizational structure through technical change, without understanding which organizational parameters are most critical to maintaining individual and collective performance.