In the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis , the Vietnam War , the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster , the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster , and the relatively sudden insertion of personal computers into the workplace , organizational scholar Karl E. Weick coined the term " cosmology episode , " as follows , in 1985 : " Representations of events normally hang together sensibly within the set of assumptions that give them life and constitute a ' cosmos ' rather than its opposite , a ' chaos . ' Sudden losses of meaning that can occur when an event is represented electronically in an incomplete , cryptic form are what I call a ' cosmology episode . ' Representations in the electronic world can become chaotic for at least two reasons : The data in these representations are flawed , and the people who manage those flawed data have limited processing capacity . These two problems interact in a potentially deadly vicious circle . " The concept of cosmology episodes evolved significantly between 1985 and 1993 , when Weick published his now-classic reanalysis of Norman Maclean 's study of the Mann Gulch wildland firefighting disaster in 1949 . In the 1993 article , Weick positions cosmology episodes within a constructivist ontology , he links the term to a variety of similar concepts , and he provides a better-developed definition than he was able to provide in 1985
Bhopal chemical disaster
Bhopal disaster
Cosmology episode