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

本提案的主题是公共行政方面的组织失败，对人的人身安全造成严重后果。在以法治为基础的民主国家中，在制度失败和考虑不周的决定导致人命受到威胁甚至丧失的情况极为罕见的情况下，通过处理各自事件的罕见性和其后果的严重性之间的不对称，这一点特别具有创新性。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忽略的统计异常值（参见，参考K. R. Popper[1959]的黑天鹅隐喻的可实现性，Taleb 2007）。它们需要系统的分析，但迄今为止还没有进行过任何分析。该项目的特别风险在于，参与有关灾害的行为者接触的机会有限，而这些行为者同时可能是调查本身不可或缺的人力资源。此外，各种病例来源的异质性可能会降低研究的可重复性。研究目标是分析公共行政各个领域的失败规律，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作出贡献。

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.