Why do unlikely organisational failures happen? Major failures of public administration are rare in democratic states, yet they can have serious consequences when they do occur. We spoke to Professor Wolfgang Seibel about his work in identifying the causal mechanisms behind organisational failures across different areas of public administration, which could help inform improved prevention measures in future. Serious failures of public administration are thankfully rare in democractic states, yet this rarity by nature makes them difficult to analyse and learn from. There is a tendency in the social sciences to focus attention on statistically significant events when investigating organisational failure, yet Professor Wolfgang Seibel believes it’s important not to neglect rarer incidents, which require a different approach. “There is insufficient acknowledgement in the social sciences that we need to apply a different kind of perspective to deal with these rare but serious events,” he outlines. This topic is at the heart of Professor Seibel’s work in the DFG-funded Black Swans in Public Administration project. “Public administrations should of course try to avoid serious failures. The question then is, how do we develop generalisable factors that enable
us to take preventative measures, on the basis of a relatively small number of cases and observations?” he asks.
Causal mechanisms This methodological puzzle is a central part of the project’s work. Through case studies on specific instances of organisational failures, including the crowd disaster at the Love Parade music event in the German city of Duisburg in 2010, researchers aim to identify generalisable causal mechanisms. “We should be able to identify generalisable causal mechanisms, even though there are only a limited number of cases,” says Professor Seibel. When seeking to make generalisations it is essential to first precisely define the focus of investigation; Professor Seibel and his colleagues’ attention is centered on extremely serious cases of organisational
failure. “We’re not looking at failures in the sense of poor performance for example, but rather cases where the failure is crystal clear. In some of these cases the mismanagement of public administration resulted in the loss of human life,” he outlines. “The first point that can be generalised here is that it is highly unlikely that somebody would allow these organisational failures to happen just out of negligence.” There may nevertheless have been particular incentives in place that encouraged public officials to make compromises they would not normally consider. The result of this may be that the physical integrity of people is essentially made negotiable, putting safety at risk. “If we can identify those common incentives, then we can look at causal mechanisms that we may be able to generalise,” says Professor Seibel.
Hurricane Katrina was an extremely destructive and deadly Category 5 hurricane that made landfall on Florida and Louisiana in August 2005, causing catastrophic damage; particularly in the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. Subsequent flooding, caused largely as a result of fatal engineering flaws in the flood protection system known as levees[3] around the city of New Orleans, precipitated most of the loss of lives.
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