Failure Matters: Conflicting Practices in a High-Tech Case

Author:

Pflugfelder Ehren Helmut1

Affiliation:

1. School of Writing, Literature, and Film, Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA

Abstract

Technical communication researchers have studied failure through a number of different case studies, though none more often than the space shuttle Challenger explosion. While scholars have offered several explanations in the intervening three decades, this work often treats the disaster as a failure of organizational communication, a failure of the material O-ring, or a failure of two discourse communities, engineers and managers, to engage in mutually comprehensible forms of meaningful deliberation. This essay hypothesizes that the real cause of failure was neither positivist nor social constructionist in nature, but discursive-material. I offer discussion of the Challenger case in order to frame a different study of project failure and show that complex technical projects fail for a number discursive-material reasons. Employing assumptions from actor–network theory and Barad’s theory of agential realism, this essay establishes a basis for how to read the Challenger disaster as one of competing and unresolved “conceptual structures of practice.” I then take this framework and apply it to a case study of a transportation project at a large, Midwestern research university. This project, the electric personal transportation vehicle, failed because competing structures of practice generated powerful actants that mattered in different ways. Insufficient project management activities also contributed to failure; the conclusion identifies concepts technical communicators can employ in establishing more effective project management strategies that work to resolve competing actants.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Education,Communication

Cited by 3 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. Expanding the Scope and Scale of Risk in TPC: Water Access and the Colorado River Basin;Technical Communication Quarterly;2023-05-12

2. What Happens When We Fail? Building Resilient Community-Based Research;Journal of Technical Writing and Communication;2019-10-15

3. Autonomous Vehicles and Gender;Transfers;2018-03-01

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