Failure Matters: Conflicting Practices in a High-Tech Case

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.

Social Design

“…Finally, we can guide students in researching and creating design failure case studies and analyzing those cases through multiple lenses. Pflugfelder (2018) demonstrated this approach by reviewing how technical communicators have assigned blame to the oft-cited Challenger o-ring disaster and offered a new perspective on design failure. Pflugfelder introduces actor-network theory to illustrate the ways that things and texts, materials and discourses become agents that can conflict and contribute to system failure.…”

What Happens When We Fail? Building Resilient Community-Based Research

“…Rather than discussing scholars’ mistakes or shortcomings, articles on failure in TPC typically discuss other people’s failures, especially related to communication, work flow, usability, and so forth. And while these exercises have their value, work on failure that is self-reflective and applicable to pedagogy and practice (see Pflugfelder, 2018) is less common. Currently, to find robust scholarship on failure in civic engagement, it is necessary to review sources like Restaino and Cella’s (2013) Unsustainable (see Blackburn & Cushman, 2013; Feigenbaum, Douglas, & Lovett, 2013; Isaacs & Kolba, 2013; Mathieu, 2013; Parks, 2013).…”