Framing Technical Decision-Making

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This grant will support a program of research-oriented training of three doctoral students per year over a three-year period on methods for and approaches to the study of emergent socio-technical systems in problem areas where potential consequences are high and technical, institutional, and policy choices are all disputed. The program is designed to provide them with a greatly enhanced range of perspectives and potential tools to apply, in a research setting that supplies both context and purpose to their education. Depending upon circumstances and the past history and training of individual students, the program will provide either one or two years of support, so that between six and nine graduate students total will be trained. The coordinated research will focus on issues that crucially depend upon the mastery both of sufficient technical and scientific expertise and on case-oriented, actor-centered approaches to modifying, extending, and complementing the tools of public policy and organization theory most often used to analyze similar situations and problems.The training will focus both on articulation of the perspectives of actors within and without the formal decision-making process and the identification and analysis of the functional and operational implications of these perspectives. Methods drawn from political science and organizational sociology will be complemented with others, such as cultural analysis, organizational ethnographies, and participant observation, drawn from more actor-oriented social science disciplines, Theories and methods adapted from social constructivism and narrative and discourse analysis will also be taught to anchor the fieldwork and ethnographies.The initial issue focus will be on greater understanding of two policy arenas with histories of contentious debate and lack of resolution for which the elements of risk and uncertainty remain open and troubling: the design of an operating system for the disposal of high-level nuclear wastes; and the management of excess weapons-grade plutonium. Preliminary work in this domain has already uncovered three different contextual settings among technical and policy elites, each of which is internally coherent, each of which generates plausible outcomes, and each of which generates different sets of policy recommendations and preferences. These conflicting views create a turbulent environment not only for policy-making overall, but for choices and specifications of organizational and institutional design. Other cases drawn from work such as air traffic control and electrical utility operation under deregulation will also be used as exemplars for the training, and will provide promising avenues for future research.The purpose of this project is to offer students from a wide range of disciplines and varying intellectual backgrounds the tools to better understand the importance and relevance of studying actor beliefs, cultures, networks, and interactions, and the degree to which the organizations and institutions that emerge will incorporate, represent, or code, these currents as constitutive or operational elements. The blending of narrative and actor-centered methods of analysis with more familiar institutional, structural, and behavioral methods should offer new insights into the ways and means by which present as well as future organizations and institutions reflect and interpret their social and political environment, or fail to.