Perrow, C. (1983). "The Organizational Context of Human Factors Engineering." Administrative Science Quarterly, 28: 521-541.

How does organizational structure affect equipment design, and how do new equipment reproduce the organizational structure? Machines are often designed to reinforce existing structures in new settings.

This paper shows why military and industrial top management are indifferent to good human factors design and shows how the social structure favors the choice of technologies that centralize authority and deskill operators and it encourages unwarrented attributions of operator error.

Perrow finds the many HFE recommendations go neglected, and that organizational theory can benefit from examining the relationship between equipment design and organizational structure.

Higher system performance has altered the operators role in three ways -- demanding higher skills and performance, reducing operating tasks to passive monitoring, or automating functions. The high demand mode threatens to exceed the biological and phsyical capacities of the operators, the passive monitoring encourages deskilling, tedium, and low system comprehension, leaving to low morale,low output, and lack of skills to cope with emergencies or even unexpected variations in system state. Designing operators out of the control system through automation reduces their system comprehension and ability to intervene in emergencies or when conditions are abnormal.

It is sometimes difficult to get operators to use new devices because they mistrust them, find them too difficult to operate, or feel they make it more difficult to reach performance targets.

But HFE's who address these issues find it difficult to influence designers and others in military and industrial organizations. Due to influences of the social structure and reward structure, designers don't have incentive to respond to HFE suggestions because top management doesn't acknowledge or reward it.

Designers often never know the consequences of their design, and work from design logic than operating logic, which are often contradictory. Elegance often wins over useability. Executives are long gone before the technology they chose is operational, and rarely hear the complaints of operators. HFE's are few and perform a job often not valued by top management. They have few links to the organization's environment. They control few resources. They are often seen as the defenders of lower status operators. Attribution of error to operators becomes the residual category.

Managers also tend not to delegate enough decision making to the operator.

The design of systems, and the equipment that is used, is not entirely determined by technical or engineering criteria, designers have significant choices available to them that will foster some types of social structures and operator behaviors rather than others".

There are also differences in how human factor engineers and social scientists assume the extent of rational behavior of operators. A social structure that emphasizes individual accountability, and in turn equipment design removes operator discretion as group consultation is not trusted. The human factors perspective reinforces a mechanistic view of the social system, atomizes the worl force, and is overly rational. As a result the equipment is designed to reinforce individual action.