Black Swans in Public Administration:·Rare Organizational Failure wlth Severe Consequences

本提案的主题是公共行政中的组织失灵，对人的人身安全造成严重后果。它特别具有创新性，因为在以法治为基础的民主国家中，在专业行政条件下，个别事件的罕见程度及其后果的严重性之间的不对称性，在那里，系统故障和导致威胁甚至丧失生命的考虑不周的决定是极其罕见的事件。然而，考虑到这种失败的严重后果，这些罕见事件不能被视为可以忽略不计的统计异常值(参见K.R.Popper[1959]《黑天鹅比喻的失败性》，Taleb 2007)。它们需要系统的分析，然而，到目前为止，还没有进行过任何分析。该项目的特殊风险在于，参与相关灾害的行为者接触受到限制，同时，他们可能是调查本身不可或缺的人力资源。此外，不同病例来源的异质性可能会降低研究的可重复性。研究的目的是分析公共行政各领域的失败规律，检验一般因果机制的假设，并对公共行政中的实用主义和责任伦理的理论辩论做出贡献。

The subject of the present proposal is organizational failure in public administration with severe consequences for the physical integrity of humans. it is especially innovative through addressing the asymmetry between the rarity of the respective incidences and the seriousness of their consequences under the condition of professional administration in rule-of-law based democracies where systems failure and ill-conceived decisions resulting in threats to, or even loss of, human lives are extremely rare events. However, given the drastic consequences of such failure, these rare events cannot be treated like negligible statistical outliers (cf., referring to K. R. Popper's [1959] Black Swan metaphor of faisifiability, Taleb 2007). They require systematic analyses none of which, however, has been undertaken so far. The particular risks of the project reside in the restricted accessibility to actors involved in the relevant disasters who, at the same time, may be indispensable human sources for the investigation itself. Also, the heterogeneity of sources across various cases may reduce the replicability of the study. The research objective is the analysis of regular patterns of failure across various fields of public administration, the test of hypothesis on general causal mechanisms and a contribution to the theoretical debate on pragmatism and the ethic of responsibility in public administration.