Time and Money: How Public Sector Agencies Resist Organizational Failure

This paper contributes to debates in the sociology of organizational failure by comparing the experiences of two governmental organizations in the United States: the Census Bureau and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Prior studies of organizational failure typically focus on the private sector with its particular arrangement of funding and stakeholders; assume failure causes such as poor environmental fit or exogenous shocks to a company; and assert that failure or low reliability is unintentional and undesirable. Our ethnographic examination of two public sector, politically-imbricated sociotechnical systems reveals novel causes and roles for failure. We observed two resource-constrained arenas in which complex sociotechnical organizations confronted significant risks: the contemporaneous production of the 2020 census and the Europa Clipper Mission. Examining the dual roles of money and time as socially constructed, relationally invoked, and politically executed constraints upon local action, we observe how complex, tightly-coupled organizations of the type Perrow associates with failure deploy time and money as buffers against risk. We analyze how relationships are renegotiated alongside competing views of the organization’s mandate, and how both time and money are co-constructed alongside powerful entities such as the Office of Management and Budget or Congress in addition to both internal and external stakeholders. Accounting for these socially-constructed “constraints” upon action enables us to articulate what actors do in contested terrain, to usefully reframe organizational failure for analysis, and to suggest implications for trust and legitimacy in public sector technical projects.