Number 5: Knowing Organizations Saves Lives

This is part of a series of Top 7 Things Sociology Offers the World.

Sociology helps us design better social organizations.

Any MBA worth her salt will tell you that how a business is organized matters. Complex organizations with multi-layers of bureaucratic systems lead to inefficiencies and poor communication. Flatter organizations are less controllable but offer better flow of communication within the organization and with the outsiders the organization serves.

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After the Challenger tragedy in 1986, Sociologist Diane Vaughan started looking at NASA's social structure and culture (including what she called a "culture of risk"), and ended up writing a book,The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, about how the bureaucratic structure of NASA contributed to the accident. It was virtually ignored by NASA until after the 2003 loss of the Colombia.

Redesigning the organization is something that sociologists do well. It is also an area where sociologists are vastly underused.

Sociology helps hard sciences understand human beings and our ecological settings more fully. (Published March 30, 2013, 6am PDT)