Foresights of Failure: An Appreciation of Barry Turner

One of Barry Turner's heroes was Tom Burns, co-author (with Stalker) of the (1961) book The Management of Innovation. What Turner liked about Burns' style of scholarship was his use of over-lapping accounts to grasp the subject matter, a style that Turner described as much like `shaking a kaleidoscope' (1995: 283). That imagery is telling because it suggests that Turner, in his own writing, may be doing something that is quite different from the run-ofthe-mill scholar who provides a `new lens' to grasp phenomena. This paper seeks to argue that the staying power of Man-Made Disasters is due, in part, to the fact that it is not a lens, but rather a kaleidoscope. The contrast between a lens and kaleidoscope comes from Nord and Connell (1993), who point out that the lens metaphor originated with Kuhn (1970) and was his way of illustrating how scientists, guided by different paradigms, see quite different patterns in the same subject matter. What is interesting is that the metaphor of a lens assumes a realist position, the lens sizes up something out there. As Nord and Connell (1993: 117) put it: