These Lives Will Not Be Lost in Vain: Organizational Learning from Disaster in U.S. Coal Mining
研究了美国煤矿企业如何从自身或他人的灾难事故中学习，以降低未来灾难发生的可能性，并比较了从灾难与从常见小事故中学习的不同机制。
The stated purpose of the investigations that invariably follow industrial, transportation, and mining disasters is to learn from those tragedies to prevent future tragedies. But does prior experience with disaster make organizations more capable of preventing future disasters? Do organizations learn from disasters experienced by other organizations? Do organizations learn differently from rare disasters than they do from common minor accidents? In its present state, the organizational safety literature is poorly equipped to answer these questions. The present work begins to address this gap by empirically examining how prior organizational experience with disaster affects the likelihood that organizations will experience future disasters. It approaches the issue in the context of fatal U.S. coal mining accidents from 1983 to 2006. The analysis demonstrates that organizations do learn to prevent future disasters through both direct and vicarious experience with disaster. It also indicates that the mechanisms through which organizations learn from disasters differ from those through which they learn from minor accidents.