This book's approach is interesting, very clearly presented, useful for researchers and students, and makes an important contribution to the field. I can see new and established scholars buying this book for its remarkably clear and insightful discussion of the ways in which we consider organizational learning and the things that prevent such learning from happening. -- Thomas A. Birkland, William T. Kretzer Distinguished Professor of Public Policy, School of Public and International Affairs, North Carolina State University For anyone interested in organizational learning, this book deserves attention. The authors identify and dissect the myriad factors influencing the Challenger and Columbia disasters, including NASA's decision making in a political setting. -- W. Henry Lambright, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University NASA learned some important safety-related lessons after the Challenger accident. This valuable book analyzes how this happened. But the subsequent un-learning of these lessons led up to the Columbia accident 17 years later. Mahler's account of that process makes the book all the more valuable. -- Eugene Bardach, professor of public policy, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy. Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning-especially in public organizations-is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA's loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.