A critical problem facing modern organizations in a variety of settings is the erosion of slack. Given narrowing performance margins allowed many organizations, managers are tempted to "lock in" organizational performance through elaborated rules and procedures, formal authority assignments, and clearly differentiated job responsibilities. A case study of one organization seeking very high reliability in its performance—a nuclear power plant—is offered to demonstrate a contrary point of view. Reliability, it is argued, can best be achieved not through attempts at organizational invariance but through the management of fluctuations in important organizational relationships and practices. This strategy enhances reliability while preserving the protective functions of organizational slack.

Organisation theorists and practitioners alike have become greatly interested in high reliability in the management of large hazardous technical systems and society's critical service infrastructures. But much of the reliability analysis is centred in particular organisations that have command and control over their technical cores. Many technical systems, including electricity generation, water, telecommunications and other “critical infrastructures,” are not the exclusive domain of single organisations. Our essay is organised around the following research question: How do organisations, many with competing, if not conflicting goals and interests, provide highly reliable service in the absence of ongoing command and control and in the presence of rapidly changing task environments with highly consequential hazards? We analyse electricity restructuring in California as a specific case. Our conclusions have surprising and important implications both for high reliability theory and for the future management of critical infrastructures organised around large technical systems.

After the demise of the space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board sharply criticized NASA’s safety culture. Adopting the high‐reliability organization as a benchmark, the board concluded that NASA did not possess the organizational characteristics that could have prevented this disaster. Furthermore, the board determined that high‐reliability theory is “extremely useful in describing the culture that should exist in the human spaceflight organization.” In this article, we argue that this conclusion is based on a misreading and misapplication of high‐reliability research. We conclude that in its human spaceflight programs, NASA has never been, nor could it be, a high‐reliability organization. We propose an alternative framework to assess reliability and safety in what we refer to as reliability‐seeking organizations.

Much of the literature of policy analysis and public administration is dominated by incremental and “divisible goods” paradigms. Policy is assumed to be a process of marginal and adjustive decision making in which benefits are dispensed piecemeal—proportionate to prevailing distributions of power or publicized need. This essay asserts the existence of a class of nonincremental, indivisible policy pursuits for which the analytical weaponry of political science is largely inappropriate. Such policies display a distinctive set of political and administrative characteristics. These characteristics are explained and examined in connection with manned space exploration policy. An assessment is offered of the challenges posed by nonincremental policy to contemporary outlooks in political science.

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