Extending naturalistic decision making to to complex organizations: a dynamic model of situated cognition

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Authors
Shattuck, Lawrence G.
Miller, Nita Lewis
Subjects
Situated cognition
Decision making
Process tracing
Advisors
Date of Issue
2005
Date
Publisher
Sage Publishers
Language
Abstract
Naturalistic decision making (NDM) has become established as a methodological and theoretical perspective. It describes how practitioners actually make decisions in complex domains. However, NDM theories tend to focus on the human agents in the system. We extend the NDM perspective to include the technological agents in complex systems and introduce the dynamic model of situated cognition. We describe the general characteristics of NDM and the field of situated cognition, and provide a detailed description of our model. We then apply the model to a recent accident in which a US Navy submarine (USS Greeneville) collided with a Japanese fishing vessel (Ehime Maru). The discussion of the accident illustrates how decisions made are often a result of the interaction between a variety of technological and human agents and how errors introduced into the complex system can propagate through it in unintended ways. We argue that the dynamic model of situated cognition can be used to describe activities in virtually any complex domain.
Type
Article
Description
The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0170840606065706
Series/Report No
Department
Operations Research
Organization
Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funder
Format
21 p.
Citation
Organization Studies, v. 27, no 7, 2005, pp. 989-1009
Distribution Statement
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.
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