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Todd R. LaPorte

Professor Emeritus of Political Science

Professor La Porte's Publications

Todd. R. La Porte is Professor of Political Science at the Univ. of California, Berkeley (1965 ), where he was also Associate Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies (1973-88.) He received his B.A. from the University of Dubuque (IA) (1953); his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University (1962), and held faculty posts at the University of Southern California, and Stanford University as well as UCB. He teaches and publishes in the areas of organization theory, technology and politics and the organizational and decision making dynamics of large, complex, technologically intensive organizations, as well as public attitudes toward advanced technologies, and the challenges of governance in a technological society. He was a principal of the Berkeley High Reliability Organization Project, a multi-disciplinary team that studied the organizational aspects of safety-critical systems such as nuclear power, air traffic control, and nuclear aircraft carriers. His research concerns the evolution of large-scale organizations operating technologies demanding very high level of operating reliable (nearly failure free) performance across a number of management generations, and the relationship of large-scale technical systems to political legitimacy. This took him to Los Alamos National Laboratory (1998-2003) examining the institutional challenges of multi-generation nuclear missions. Most recently, he has taken up questions of crisis management in the face of new types of threats emerging from our sustained engagement with Radical Islam. In a parallel effort, he is examining the institutional evolution of a critical element in the nation's meteorological monitoring capacity and Earth Observation system, the development of the National Polar-orbiter Operational Environmental Satellite System managed by NOAA and the DOD in cooperation with NASA.

He was a Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, and Research Fellow, Wissenschaftszentrum (Sciences Center) Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Social Research, Cologne. In 1985, he was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration. Service on editorial boards includes Policy Sciences, Public Administration Review, Technology Studies, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, and the Steering Committee, Large Technical Systems International Study Group. He has been a member of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management, and served on panels of the Committee on Human Factors, and Transportation Research Board, National Academy of Sciences. He served on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, Department of Energy, and chaired its Task Force on Radioactive Waste Management, examining questions of institutional trustworthiness, and was on the Technical Review Committee, Nuclear Materials Technology Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has also served as a member of: the Committee on Long Term Institutional Management of DOE Legacy Waste Sites: Phase Two; and the Committee on Principles and Operational Strategies for Staged Repository Systems, both of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management, The National Academies of Science (2001-2003). He has consulted with DOE's, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and currently is a Faculty Affiliate, Decision Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory.