Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"From the dead reckoning of early navigation with its reliance on sun, stars, and wind, Vaughan develops her analysis of the present-day work of an air traffic controller, which involves an increasingly high degree of automation with consequent loss of skills and many controllers’ jobs. Drawing on interview data, Vaughan illuminates what has made air travel so safe by examining the large sociotechnical systems in which work is performed, focusing on the changing nature of organizations, technologies, and work. Recommended." * Choice *
"Diane Vaughan’s
Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk shows exactly
how organizational excellence is achieved through organizational member’s ongoing collaborative work undergirded by—and sometimes despite—organizational rules, political pressures, and other societal demands that shapes the external environment. The result is an excellent portrayal of what Daniel F. Chambliss once called the “mundanity of excellence” in complex organizations—showing how far from obvious, or mundane, it is." * Social Forces *
"Diane Vaughan’s famous analysis of the Challenger tragedy is followed here with a study of air traffic control. Vaughan really wants to know how it works and she succeeds. As a result she is in the right place, both physically and analytically, to explain what happened to a sky full of airplanes on 9/11. And Vaughan can write: just her introductory description of how she invaded the controllers’ domain is gripping. Like her Challenger book, this sets the gold standard." -- Harry Collins, Cardiff University
“With
Dead Reckoning, Vaughan—a leading student of how organizations go wrong—studies an organizational system, the air flight control system for commercial aviation, with an extraordinary track record of getting things right. The author approaches her topic from every direction, seamlessly integrating organization theory and technology studies; analyzing how skill is embedded both in individuals and in workgroups but also how the institutional systems in which controllers live and with which they must interact shape their work; and, in a model of multi-method, multi-level research, combining multi-site ethnography with historical analysis spanning forty years and including such events as the PATCO strike and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The result is a breathtaking achievement, a comprehensive, analytically shrewd, and gracefully written study that explains the effectiveness of air flight controllers both in routine times and during crises.” -- Paul DiMaggio, New York University
"Vaughan explores air traffic control with unparalleled care: an awe-inspiring breadth, depth, and lyricality that is mostly unmatched in contemporary scholarship on organizations, cementing her reputation as one of the most inspired scholars of her generation." * Organization Studies *
Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables
Part I: Beginnings
Chapter 1. Dead Reckoning
Why Air Traffic Control?
Introduction to the System: “A Monkey Could Do This Job”
System Effects on the Project
On Time and Discovery: Historical Ethnography and Socio-technical System History
The Architecture of This Book
Chapter 2. History as Cause: System Emergence, System Effects
A Formation Story
Precedent and Innovation: Boundaries and Boundary Work
The Age of Innovators: The Diffusion of Ideas, Networks, and Infrastructure Formation, 1880–1920
The Age of Organization: Controllers, Technologies, and Boundaries, Ground and Sky, 1920–1950
The Jet Age: Congestion, Technological Lag, and PATCO, 1950–1980
The Age of Conflict, Decline, and Repair: The Strike, NATCA, and Technological Glitches, 1980–2000
Dead Reckoning at the Turn of the Century: History, Boundaries, and Turf Wars in the Sky, 2000–2001
Part II: Producing Controllers
Chapter 3. From Skill Acquisition to Expertise
The Academy: The Screen, the Game, and Survival of the Fittest
The Facility: The Apprentice and the Trainer
The Subtleties of the Craft: Dead Reckoning
Chapter 4. Embodiment: The Social Shaping of Controllers
Carryover into Everyday Life
Fundamental Change: Becoming a Type A Personality
A Cultural System of Knowledge: Expertise, Embodiment, and Ethnocognition
Part III: Boundary Work: Airspace, Place, and Dead Reckoning
System Effects: Culture, Ethnocognition, and Distributed Cognition
Chapter 5. Boston Center and Bedford Tower
Boston Center
Bedford Tower
Chapter 6. The Terminal: Boston TRACON and Boston Tower
The TRACON: Boston Terminal Radar Approach Control
Boston Tower
The Terminal: Boston TRACON and Tower
Part IV: Emotional Labor, Emotion Work
Chapter 7. Mistake and Error: Emotional Labor
Close Calls
Having a Deal
Space, Place, and Boundaries: When Is a Deal Not a Deal?
Mistake and Error as System Effects: Crossing the Boundaries of Time and Social Space
Chapter 8. Risk and Stress: Emotion Work
Losing Control: Stress-Producing Conditions
The Social and Cultural Transformation of Risky Work
Culture, Cognition, and the Normalization of Risk and Stress
The Individual, the Group, and Cultural Devices
Part V: “That Little Frisson of Terror”
Chapter 9. September 11
Boston Center
The Command Center
Boston Center
The TRACON
Boston Tower
Bedford Tower
The Attacks: System Response and System Effects
Chapter 10. The War on Terror: Policing the Sky
Changing Boundaries: Restrictions, Translation, and Local Coordination
Police Work, Emotion Work
A Fragile Stability: 2002
The War on Terror: System Response and System Effects
Chapter 11. Symbolic Boundaries: Distinction, Occupational Community, and Moral Work
Formal Structure and Occupational Community
Status and Moral Work
Maintaining Moral Boundaries
Part VI: System Effects, Boundary Work, and Risk
Boundary Work as Power Work
The Intersection of Two Trajectories: Implementation, Budget Battles, Shutdowns, and Failures
The Liabilities of Technological and Organizational Innovation
Chapter 12. The Age of Automation: 2002–Present
Boston Tower and Boston TRACON
Boston Tower
Boston TRACON
Chapter 13. Continuities, Change, and Persistence
System Effects, Resilience, and Agency
Dead Reckoning: Coordinating Action and Anticipating Futures in Complex Organizational Systems
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
