Bøger af Diane Vaughan

Many books explain why relationships end, but never before has a book shown in riveting step-by-step detail precisely how they end. Through extensive interviews and original research, Diane Vaughan reveals the underlying pattern beneath every disintegrating relationship. This is a groundbreaking book that will help anyone who has ever left a relationship--or been left--to understand "what happened". Perhaps even more important, it will help some people who don't even know their relationship is in trouble to see what is happening. Armed with a new awareness of what is usually an unconscious process--until it's too late--the partners acquire the ability to either live with it, control it, or change it. Vaughan shows that no matter what the characteristics of the couple involved, rich or poor, straight or gay, married or not, and whether they've been together 18 months or 18 years, the dynamics of the uncoupling process are essentially the same. The key to understanding how two people separate, according to Vaughan, is the role they assume in the leavetaking. Most often, one partner--the initiator--wants out of a relationship while the other wants the relationship to continue. Although both people must go through the same steps in altering their perceptions of each other and themselves, they do so at different times. By the time the still-loving partner realizes the relationship is in serious trouble, the initiator is already gone in a number of ways. Uncoupling begins with the initiator's first secret awareness of discomfort, depicts his or her search for a confidant (who is selected is a telling factor), and reveals the subtle, often barely perceptible signalling of his discontent to the partner. Vaughan traces the initiator's groping for and testing of a new single identity and depicts the initiator's confrontation with the partner. She shows how two people try and why trying often fails. Finally, she explains how the partner makes his or her own transition out of the relationship. Replete with case histories, many poignant, the book provides answers to many puzzling questions: why one person can sometimes take the end of a long-term relationship so calmly...why counseling so often fails...why one member of a couple can be so much better prepared for a single life than the other...why some people never psychologically separate...and much more.

A brilliant sociological look at the dynamics of separation and an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to understand-or prevent-the collapse of a relationship.How do relationships end? Why does one partner suddenly become discontented with the other-and why is the onset of that discontentment not so sudden after all? What signals do partners send each other to indicate their doubts? Why do those signals so often go unnoticed? And how do people who saw themselves as part of a couple come to terms not just with absence and abandonment, but with a new, single identity? Drawing from extensive research and in-depth interviews, this groundbreaking book reveals a process that begins in secret but gradually becomes public, implicating not only partners but their social milieu. Enlightening, accessible, and deeply affecting, Uncoupling offers a startling vision of what really happens behind the surface when relationships come apart.

The original publication of The Challenger Launch Decision occurred on January 28th, 1996, the 10th anniversary of that catastrophe. That very morning, a Sunday, the book was features in the New York Times front page story while its author was talking about the book on Good Morning America. While everyone knew that faulty O rings were directly responsible, Vaughan s book revealed how and why this problem was both known and ultimately discounted by NASA prior to greenlighting the flight. It quickly went on to become, and still is, the definitive account of the organizational origins of the accident and a model for understanding how complex organizations work more generally. So much so that when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated coming back itno the atmosphere seven years later, Vaughan was asked to consult for the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and then to write a chapter for their formal report. This edition of the book contains a very substantial, new preface offering an insider s perspective on that investigation as well as explaining how the same organizational problems responsible for the Challenger disaster were also at the root of what happened to Columbia."