ABSTRACT
I turn now to an overview of the causes of the Challenger accident. The published research from which this is drawn is a historical ethnography based on original NASA documents and interviews used by the Presidential Commission appointed to investigate the tragedy (currently stored at the National Archives, Washington, DC), the Presidential Commission's (1986) report (five volumes) and the 1986 report of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, personal interviews, analysis of original docu ments, and other sources. To present the full theory of the normalization of deviance in these pages, I present the findings without the supporting data. Interested readers should see the original (Vaughan, 1996). Relevant refer ences selected from the original, supplemented by some recent works with similar themes, are in the bibliography of this text.
