THE MULTIPLE MEANINGS AND MODELS OF RELIABILITY IN ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH

Reliability has been the focus of systematic organizational research since the pioneering work of a group of researchers at the University of California, berkeley, in the 1980 s (Roberts, 1990). The researchers were curious about the seemingly theory-defying ability of some organizations to avoid catastrophic operational outcomes despite operating technologies that were fraught with exceptionally high levels of risk, uncertainty, hazard, and public intolerance of failures (La Porte & Consolini, 1991; Roberts, 1993). Their “Careful description of a special set of organizations” (Boin & Schulman, 2008, p.1053) was encapsulated in the acronym HRO— that is, high reliability organizations. Their primary