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In recent years, the global automobile industry has witnessed many large-scale crises such as Toyota’s sudden unintended acceleration problems, General Motors’ (GM) faulty ignition switches and Volkswagen’s (VW) manipulation of emissions. Curiously, these carmakers experienced these crises right around the time when they became the World’s No. 1 Carmaker. These crises left hundreds of people dead or injured, the shareholders of these companies lost billions of dollars (Liker, 2015). It is imperative that we understand how large-scale crises occur in complex systems such as the global automobile industry and how we can prevent such events.
Crises are “messy” situations best understood from the perspectives of multiple disciplines (Kovoor, 1991; Mitroff et al., 1988; Pearson and Clair, 1998; Staw et al., 1981). Despite the scholarly work on the need to use multiple perspectives to understand large-scale crises, the general public and the media focus often on a small subset of causes such as technical problems and operator errors. Crises, however, are rarely caused by technical problems or operator errors alone (Dekker, 2011; Mitroff and Linstone, 1995). Consider, for instance, NASA’s Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986. The technical problem of faulty O-rings that sealed the joints of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters was not the only or even the primary cause of the explosion of the shuttle (Starbuck and Milliken, 1988). Similarly, in 2003, Columbia disintegrated upon entry into the earth’s atmosphere not only or primarily because during lift-off, a large chunk of foam had hit the thermal tiles on the underside of the shuttle’s wings. The causes of these disasters were also organizational, structural and cultural (Starbuck and Farjoun, 2005; Vaughan, 1996).
Studying and understanding crises from as many perspectives as possible is obviously a daunting task. Many scholars and practitioners with different backgrounds and expertise have looked at Toyota’s recall crisis and provided valuable but partial explanations informed by their own perspectives (Andrews et al., 2011; Camuffo and Weber, 2011; Camuffo and Wilhelm, 2016; Chowdhury, 2014; Cole, 2011; Liker and Ogden, 2011; MacDuffie and Fujimoto, 2010; NHTSA, 2011; Ohmae, 2010). It is, however, useful and necessary to provide a larger framework within which these various perspectives can be integrated. This article uses Alpaslan and Mitroff’s (2011) multi-perspective methodology to clarify and...