Evaluation of Scholarly Sources

Des Greeks et des lettres "total recall 1"  9/3/15 via Flickr
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Throughout 2014, GM has been the subject to unprecedented recalls in particular related to stalling issues in Cobalt and Ion vehicles. The Harvard Law and Management Science articles look at different related aspects to the circumstances that both preceded and resulted from the internal failure of GM to do anything about the ignition switch and subsequent stalling issues for ten years.

In an article published in Harvard Law and Policy Review, Rena Steizor deeply dissects the entire GM fiasco from beginning to end. She highlights the issues from multiple different standpoints such as a section on the failure of the management, another on the oversight of the engineers, another about the Valukas investigative report, etc. Steizor dives deeply into the legal implications and the mismanagement and precisely how it should be punished.

The Management Science article, written by Gary Chao, Seyed Iravani, and Canan Savaskan, views the recall issue from a different perspective. In recent years, more and more of the process of constructing an automobile has been outsourced to specialized suppliers and engineering companies. This has made uniform quality control more difficult in some situations. Such was the situation with the ignition recall. Delphi Mechatronics was the supplier that produced the defective ignition switch for GM. The article goes into a technical explanation of how, based on selective root cost analysis or complete root cause analysis, the cost of a recall may be shared between a manufacturer and a outside supplier.