Going back in time to study what we think we know about the past always entails the possibility of surprise, discovery, and unexpected outcomes. Research in history regularly shows how the past appears different from what we thought of it.1 A recent example in safety is the second reading of Perrow’s classic Normal Accidents (Perrow, 1984), emphasising a different analysis of the book than the more established one and revealing an opposite thesis to the main one (Le Coze, 2015a, Le Coze, 2020). The change of perspective goes like this: in the decades following the publication of the book in the 1980 s, Perrow never really commented on any technological disasters as “normal”, but always instead had an interpretation of such events as “waiting to happen“, the products of a lack of sufficient attention paid to safety (for instance, Fukushima in 2011; Perrow, 2013).

 

Thus, when reading the book again, from the perspective of the 2010 s, a second thesis proved to be more relevant than the main one, a second thesis that Perrow favoured in the decades following the release of the book. Pursuing this lead, Perrow emerges as the critical thinker that he was, the sociologist of the society of organisations (Perrow, 1991), and shows how Normal Accidents fits in this picture. This example shows that the present can shed a different light on the past, reinterrogating it and pitting a new interpretation against a dominant one, changing the way one can think of a topic, a book, an author, or a research tradition.

 

This is what this article does with one author, Howard McCurdy. McCurdy’s is a public administration (PA) scholar who specialised in space policy with a strong interest for the topic of bureaucracy which he confronted to the challenges of reliability, safety and performance of NASA (the National Aeronautic and Space Agency). For McCurdy, bureaucracy is one of the most important concepts in public administration (McCurdy, 1977). Influenced by the work of Weber on this theme, then by the sociological contributions of Selznick, 1949, Kaufman, 1960, Crozier, 1964 and Perrow (1972), his subsequent empirical case studies of NASA on safety related issues (McCurdy, 1993, McCurdy, 2001) find their inspiration in what have been described as the classics of the sociology of organisation produced between the 1950 s and 1970 s (Reed, 2009).

 

For him, administrations and bureaucracies must be understood as the complex social and political realities that they are, challenging for instance the politics-administration dichotomy and the idea that administration is all about efficiency (at the expense of other important ideals such as freedom, equality, Waldo, 1948). He is also inspired by Appleby, who argued that one could not understand and govern administrative realities in the same way as private ones (Appleby, 1949). In addition to these sociological classics, McCurdy’s discusses other insights from the 1940 s and 1970 s gained from economists such as Von Mises or Downs, writers such as Orwell, or psychologists like Argyris, Bennis, or McGregor (McCurdy, 1977).

 

With these authors, McCurdy introduces the now classic debates between the supporters of bureaucracies and their critics, but also their reformers, with the promotion of post-bureaucratic principles, a topic still much debated fifty years later (see for instance Matyjazik, 2019 on New Public Management, NMP in public administration, or in the private sector, Hamel and Zanini, 2020) and a topic at the heart of NASA’s history. As shown in Table 1, what psychologists, political scientists, essayists, and sociologists targeted was the standard interpretation and version of Weber’s rigid, formal, hierarchical, impersonal, specialised and static bureaucracy. Against it, their critiques delineated something that McCurdy synthesised in his table as a post-bureaucratic option (e.g., more flexible, adaptive, informal, flatter, dynamic, team-oriented bureaucracy Table 1).

 

The aim of this article is twofold. First, after a methodological section, it reveals the empirical and theoretical value of McCurdy’s contribution to the study of NASA from a safety point of view, emphasising its multilevel and longitudinal approach. To do so, McCurdy’s research on NASA’s reliability, safety, and performance in relation to bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy discourses is exposed and applied to SpaceX as an illustration. Second, it shows, in the discussion section, how it brings new perspectives to past and contemporary debates in the field of safety. It is argued that McCurdy offers several innovative contributions on core safety debates (Haavik, 2021), which the article highlights through two subsections, “Reinterrogating the past”, and “Challenging the present”.