SOCIAL PROBLEMS, Vol. 49, No. 2, pages 150–177. ISSN: 0037-7791; online ISSN: 1533-8533 © 2002 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. Waiting for Crisis: Regulatory Inaction and Ineptitude and the Guadalupe Dunes Oil Spill THOMAS D. BEAMISH, University of Georgia Swift and ameliorative governmental response to a range of threatening circumstances is crucial to public health and safety. This is especially the case given the expanding role such “control organizations” play in mod- ern life. In this capacity, government organizations are in a position to arbitrate “acceptable risk” by either pur- suing issues that affect the public or not. With this as its backdrop, this paper analyzes governmental response to a petroleum spill that over four decades of unmitigated leaks became the United State’s largest on record. Using notions of “organized anarchy,” modied to address an inter-organizational decision-making context, it is shown that regulators’ incapacity to act on this toxic yet non-acute hazard was the interactive outcome of 1) crescive trouble: a genre of “problem” government administrators are not organized to detect and 2) orga- nized anarchy: organizational coordination difculties that further hampered inter-agency cooperation and problem interdiction. The organizational response this spill gained exemplies shortcomings found in the way administrative systems manage and respond to “a crisis in the making.” The analysis and conclusions drawn have implications for a range of nascent social problems that under current institutional mandates are left to fes- ter until they manifest as acute traumas or involve substantial immiseration. Every day we place our trust in a myriad of federal, state, and local agencies to forth- rightly and judiciously appraise and stem potential threats before injuries occur. As “control organizations,” such agencies convened to monitor and in the advent of excess, identify, pro- tect, and enforce violations (Diver 1980; Ermann and Lundman 1978; Hawkins 1983, 1984, 1992, 1997; Hawkins and Thomas 1989). Whether one embraces such institutional actors because they represent one’s “interests” (Giddens 1990, 1991), or distrusts them based on impressions of institutional recreancy (Freudenburg 1993), does not diminish their signicance or strategic location and charge in “risk society” (Beck 1992a, 1996). Such regulatory organi- zations play a lead role in contemporary society “assessing, mitigating, and accepting risks” on behalf of the public (Clarke 1989:4; Clarke and Short 1993; Freudenburg and Pastor 1992; Perrow 1991). While strong scholarship was conducted regarding policy construction (Haw- kins 1997; Hawkins and Thomas 1989), implementation (Diver 1980; Gifford 1989; Pressman and Wildavsky 1984; Van Meter and Van Horn 1975), and the related topic of organizational decision-making processes (Lindblom 1959, 1979; March and Olsen 1976; Weick 1995), little empirical and sociological work was conducted on routine regulatory procedure gone bad (Clarke 1999; Freudenburg and Gramling 1994b; Vaughan 1998). In line with this research agenda, the following analysis has as its focal point, a case—the Guadalupe oil spill, the largest in U.S. history. Specically, this spill was the outcome of The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the generous funding support of the University of California Toxic Research and Teaching Program (TRTP) and the U.S. Minerals Management Service (contract # 14-35-0001- 30796). The author would also like to thank Harvey Molotch, Diane Vaughan, Charles Perrow, William Freudenburg, Jacqueline Romo, David Smith editor, Social Problems, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Direct corre- spondence to: Thomas D. Beamish, Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. E-mail: tbeamish@arches.uga.edu.