The Organizational Context of Human Factors Engineering
探讨组织背景如何限制人因工程师的影响力，解释军事和工业高层为何忽视良好的人因设计，并分析社会结构如何偏向集权技术和归咎操作员错误。
Human factors engineering concerns the design of equipment in accordance with the mental and physical characteristics of operators. Human factors engineers advise design engineers, but the organizational context limits their influence and restricts their perspective. The discussion of organizational context in this paper explains why military and industrial top management personnel are indifferent to good human factors design and shows how the social structure favors the choice of technologies that centralize authority and deskill operators and how it encourages unwarranted attributions of operator error. The role of equipment and system design in shaping cognitive maps and mental models is explored, and the technology-social structure paradigm is questioned.