Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow My rating: 5 of 5 stars It's hard to put labels on this book. It's about complexity and systems theory and sociological analysis of workplace relations on the surface, but in drawing all these areas together it also presented a fundamentally humanist analysis countering the pragmatic and rationalist perspectives that are more common in this field. Beginning with the idea that in complex systems predicting all eventualities is, by definition, impossible, Perrow argues that we must accept that some kinds of accidents will be inevitable or "normal". A key concept he introduces is that of coupling. When a system is tightly coupled, one event will lead to another without opportunity for intervention; when a system is loosely coupled, buffers of time and human expertise allow for intervention and the possibility of avoiding accidents. On the surface, this might sound dry and not a very compelling read, ...