Some Characteristics of High-Reliability Networks

This research note documents the initial findings of an ongoing ethnographic study at a fire and emergency service. This particular organization has become a focus of attention because of its skilled coordination of handling large-scale organized events in cooperation with a large number of other organizations, thereby increasing their reliability. First of all, we will introduce the case and our observations, then discuss our findings against the backdrop of high-reliability theory. We use these findings to characterize high-reliability networks.