It’s time to lift the veil on incompetence

FOR those of us who think that OJ Simpson killed his former wife, his death last week (Apr 10) was a reminder of one of the most useless bits of detective work in history: a double-homicide investigation in which the Los Angeles Police Department failed to fit up a guilty man. In short, the essence of incompetence.

One of the things about incompetence is that it turns up in almost every field. Take Boeing, whose travails are the most high-profile, ongoing example in the private sector. This is a company that can’t deliver the basic ask of an aeroplane manufacturer that its planes get from A to B in one piece.

In general, our understanding of what drives incompetence is low and understudied. As a new paper in the British Journal of Sociology (BJS) demonstrates, there is essentially no formal study of the problem in sociology. There isn’t even a widely agreed upon definition, though the paper suggests what seems to me a pretty good one, of unsatisfactory performance relative to standards.