Constance Perin
New Book Now in Paperback Constance Perin received her AB and AM in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, a master's degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, and her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from The American University. The author of three other books, she is a member of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and the Society for the Social Study of Science. Since 1983, she has conducted most of her research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is a Visiting Scholar in Anthropology. grounded agenda-setting piece of work held together by an amazing blend of concepts and evidence!" Karl E. Weick, Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology, Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan "Constance Perin's study is a penetrating and worrisome analysis. . . . [She] brings flashes of uncommonly graceful language and a sense of empathy for those with whom she spoke, which adds color to the usually bloodless dialects of probabilistic risk assessment. . . . [Perin's study] could result in a crisper recognition of the dilemmas we face . . . [while] her conclusions point to serious matters of institutional policy."--Todd R. La Porte, Administrative Science Quarterly, March 2006 "This work, based on extraordinarily rich materials from sustained fieldwork, is a worthy successor to Charles Perrow's pathbreaking Normal Accidents and is without doubt a signal contribution to the burgeoning interest in 'risk society.' But for me, its special significance is in its innovations in the marshalling of what now counts as ethnographic analysis and evidence, for which models are badly needed. In short, this a work that I can teach with." George E. Marcus, Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, and coauthor, Anthropology as Cultural Critique At the world's some 440 nuclear power plants, experts continually monitor their wide safety margins, and at signs of trouble seek out the sources and recommend changes. Too often for their comfort, and for ours, a subsequent problem reveals that these changes were ineffective or never made. Why this self-defeating pattern? What in this technology's culture of control might undermine experts' best intentions? What kind of problem is it to reduce operating risks?
Following brief highlights of this industry's history over the last twenty years of accidents, near-accidents, and institutional changes, Shouldering Risks presents excerpts from interviews with some sixty experts about four relatively recent events at three U.S. plants. Drawing also on her earlier field studies at eleven plants in America and abroad, on industry documents, and others' research, Constance Perin identifies unacknowledged elements in this industry's culture of control; for example, control concepts for reactor design, construction, and regulation carry over to risk handling and event analysis, whose efficacy depends instead on recognizing and interpreting the significance of technical and contextual signals on daily display. After retelling in plant experts' own words the stories of those events and drawing on her own and others' research, Shouldering Risks identifies several unrecognized elements in this industry's culture of control. The calculated logics of designers, the real-time logics of operators, and the policy logics of executives each represent ways of thinking about uncertainty and risk and of defining the kinds of knowledge each requires. Juxtaposing these logics analytically as they are juxtaposed in practice, Shouldering Risks reconfigures the design, organization, and management of this high hazard technology into a “significance culture” in which reliably identifying and interpreting the meanings of signals, however faint, is the crux of control. Adding that axis of meanings to this industry’s axis of functions leads to reconsidering the intellectual capital needed for its culture of control from design to operation – and needed perhaps for the cultures of control in other risky enterprises. A culture of control is, like any culture, an intricate system of claims about how to understand the world and act in it. Here, claims pivot around the dynamics of control theory and productivity based on particular assumptions about the relationships of humans to machines, models to reality, certainty to ambiguity, rationality to experience. These four events and accident analyses show that such assumptions can confound control and produce misleading meanings. Shouldering Risks reimagines a broader and deeper culture of control to reshape our understandings of the intellectual capital appropriate to designing, regulating, organizing, and managing this risky enterprise and, perhaps, other such technologies already here or to come. |
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