She is known for her work on organizational and management issues, in particular in the case of the space shuttle Challenger Disaster.
[1][2][3] Diane Vaughan studied Sociology at Ohio State University, and received her PhD in 1979.
From 1986 to 1987 she was a Visiting Fellow, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford.
[6] In the understanding of safety and risk, Vaughan is perhaps best known for coining the phrase "normalization of deviance",[7] which she has used to explain the sociological causes of the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
[8][9][10] Vaughan defines this as a process where a clearly unsafe practice comes to be considered normal if it does not immediately cause a catastrophe: "a long incubation period [before a final disaster] with early warning signs that were either misinterpreted, ignored or missed completely.