The Financial Crisis: Caused by Unpreventable or Organized Failures?

In this paper, I analyze cutaways of the current financial crisis against the background of normal accident theory, high reliability theory, and disaster incubation theory. To avoid future financial crises I recommend reducing pressures to make profit and organizing the global financial markets like high reliability organizations. Furthermore I argue that risk management within organizations must no longer only be a symbolic gesture. The paper’s purpose is to break with the isolated financial view of the crisis’s causes and effects. It is a plea for a new understanding of the financial crisis, transferring the view from the crisis’s impact to its features and causal factors. The study at hand should be regarded as preparatory work for a more interdisciplinary approach to the current crisis and for special branches of science to cooperate