There has not yet been a comprehensive method that goes behind 'human error' and beyond the failure concept, and various complicated accidents have accentuated the need for it. The Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) fulfils that need. This book presents a detailed and tested method that can be used to model how complex and dynamic socio-technical systems work, and understand both why things sometimes go wrong but also why they normally succeed.

Contents: Prologue; The need; The intellectual background; The principles; The method: preliminaries; The method: identify and describe the functions (step 1); The method: the identification of variability (step 2); The method: the aggregation of variability (step 3); The method: consequences of the analysis (step 4); Three cases; Afterthoughts; FRAM on FRAM; Index.

Erik Hollnagel (Ph.D., psychology) is Professor at the Department of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark, Industrial Safety Chair at MINES Paris-Tech (France), Professor Emeritus at University of Linköping (Sweden), and Visiting Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Technische Universitÿt Mÿnchen (Germany). Since 1971 he has worked within universities, research centres and industries in several countries facing problems from several domains, including nuclear power generation, aerospace and aviation, air traffic management, software engineering, healthcare, and land-based traffic. His professional interests include industrial safety, resilience engineering, accident investigation, cognitive systems engineering and cognitive ergonomics. He has published more than 250 papers and authored or edited 18 books, some of the most recent titles being The ETTO Principle (Ashgate, 2009) and Resilience Engineering in Practice (Ashgate, 2011). Erik Hollnagel is also Editor-in-Chief of the book series Ashgate Studies in Resilience Engineering.