Rate My Professor Diane Vaughan
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About Diane
Diane Vaughan is Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in the Social Science faculty. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Ohio State University in 1979, M.A. in 1974, and B.A. in 1973, graduating summa cum laude with honors from Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi. Her career includes a post-doctoral fellowship in Sociology of Social Control at Yale University (1979-1982), Research Associate at Wellesley College Center for Research on Women (1982-1984), and progressive roles at Boston College: Assistant Professor (1984-1986), Associate Professor (1986-1996), and Professor (1996-2005). Since 2005, she has held her current position at Columbia. Vaughan was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford (1986-1987), Visiting Fellow at the American Bar Foundation (1988-1989), National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1996-1997), and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (2003-2004). She served as Investigation Consultant and Board Research Analyst for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003), authoring Chapter 8 of the report. She was Harry Lyman Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor at McMaster University (2003) and Visiting Lecturer at Sciences Po MPA Program (2010-2012).
Vaughan's research examines organization theory, organizational analysis and failure, analogical theorizing, science, knowledge, and technology, deviance and social control, and qualitative methods including ethnography, interviewing, historical, and archival research. Influenced by Simmel, she developed analogical theorizing for general theoretical explanations through cross-case comparisons. Her major books are Controlling Unlawful Organizational Behavior (University of Chicago Press, 1983), Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships (Oxford University Press, 1986), The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (University of Chicago Press, 1996; second edition 2016), and Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk (University of Chicago Press, 2021). These historical ethnographies explore system effects in socio-technical systems, individual agency, resilience, institutional persistence, change, culture, and cognition. Her Challenger analysis introduced normalization of deviance, widely influential. Awards include the American Sociological Association Public Understanding of Sociology Award (2006), Robert K. Merton Book Award (1996), Rachel Carson Prize (1997), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award (2023) for Dead Reckoning, Faculty Mentoring Award from Columbia GSAS (2012), and Distinguished Lecturer for the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (2015). Currently, she studies resilience and works on theorizing analogy, cases, and comparative social organization.
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