Risk in Real Time

One of the most pressing issues for an anthropology of technology today is control: how complex systems are managed with an eye not only to performance but also to safety. Over the past half-century, the United States has become increasingly reliant on extremely complex systems that run on a 24hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week schedule. Air traffic control, nuclear weapons systems, and nuclear power plants are all parts of the infrastructure of American society that present the potential for mass disaster alongside new forms of technological power. Such complex systems are perfectible only via the combined performance of designers, builders, and the teams of professionals that operate them on a minute-tominute basis. This last group of experts is the focus of Constance Perin’s Shouldering Risks, which makes a significant contribution to the literatures of risk, safety, and technical expertise. Relying on both ethnographic and textual analysis, Perin asks how “safety” is imagined, engineered, and assessed by experts in the U.S. nuclear power industry. She presents a nuclear power plant as a vast assemblage of technologies that operate at extreme temperatures and under high internal pressures, are infused with radioactive materials, and cost billions of dollars to build. In day-to-day operations, experts are caught between the demands of energy production, the economic costs of delays or shutdowns (a potential milliondollar-a-day loss), and the horrific possibility of making a Chernobyl-sized mistake. Perin approaches plant workers as heroic subjects who take responsibility for negotiating conflicting demands. She follows them as they assess from one minute to the next how subtle changes in machinery or overall system performance might constitute a risk. By doing so, she theorizes the “culture of control” within the nuclear power industry and presents a case for the productive extension and integration of “safety” into complex systems more generally. Shouldering Risks begins with an intellectual interrogation of “control” in the nuclear power industry, presenting the issue of safety as a problem of managing perceptions, priorities, and regulations in real time. In this multiplicity, Perin recognizes “orders” of experts, each deploying a specific form of knowledge and skill. These orders strive to eliminate uncertainty in their specific areas under formal review guidelines, but ultimately they speak different expert languages and use different theories of risk. One of Perin’s key insights is that expert orders are not formally coordinated with one another; there is therefore a disunity at the center of “control” that is unaccounted for in the formal deliberations of the industry. In short, institutional hierarchies delineate worker responsibility and expertise but also multiply the complexities around the collective perception and evaluation of risk. Translation between expert orders becomes a key factor in producing “control,” but it is not formally incorporated into the institution’s regulatory process. For Perin, “control” thus becomes a series of real-time trade-offs and negotiations that can, in the complexity of machine/human and human/human interactions, amplify rather than reduce risk. The center of the book presents detailed ethnographic investigations of failures in the culture of control at three power plants. Perin examines four episodes of control failure at length: the discovery of a leaking valve in a reactor cooling system; the accidental shutdown of a turbine by a worker throwing the wrong circuit breaker; the hiring of a known security risk who is nonetheless allowed access to a reactor; and, finally, a potentially catastrophic episode in which a melting transformer is discovered but nonetheless left operating for a day while workers deliberate a course of action. Perin interviewed the key participants, paying particular attention to their shifting understandings of events. The temporal dimension of risk assessment is as crucial as the recognition that all parties are working with partial knowledge of specific plant conditions. In each case, the degree of risk associated with the event changes over time as experts move from their expectations of known risk to real-time assessments to postmortem analysis. In the final two chapters, Perin examines these lessons and theorizes the logic of a culture of control that must combine both “calculated” and “real-time” logics of risk. She argues that these two forms of assessment are not treated as equal in the nuclear industry: calculated threats are prioritized over real-time assessments until an incident diverts workers from a scripted understanding of risk. Thus, the area of most danger—the real-time assessment process in a moment of potential crisis—is left an implicit form of knowledge mobilization. Perin attributes this structure to a top-down command-and-control logic of institutional order (drawn from both regulatory pressures and the historical links of the industry to the navy). She suggests that formally valuing expert forms of “doubt and discovery” (the real-time interrogation of risk based on expertise and craft as well as prediction) would improve the culture of control. To this end, Perin imagines Shouldering Risks as a political intervention in the management of complex systems as well as an analysis of risk management and knowledge cultures in the nuclear industry.