Safe Science: Governing Green Laboratories

该项目研究了一个新的环境，健康和安全系统（EHS）的开发和实施，该系统是由美国环境保护署和一所主要研究型大学之间的同意法令产生的。该协议是一种较新的监管形式的一个例子，旨在以符合法定公共目标的方式促进对私营公司的更好管理。虽然大多数监管试图管理私营公司的某些活动，但这一战略取代了更为熟悉的政策，即要求使用特定技术或特定绩效水平。相反，同意法令使用了一种基于管理的策略，将监管的设计、标准制定和实施定位于受监管组织本身，创造了一种符合公共利益的私人管理形式，或一种远程监管。虽然许多研究试图确定监管是否有效，以及它是否具有成本效益，但很少有研究着眼于基层-组织内部，在车间层面-追踪日常工作和政府监管之间的行为和认知线索。通过观察新的EHS组织的发明，其实施以及在非常不同的组织单位中的传播，研究将通过绘制当地文化影响健康和安全实践的方式来打开监管文化的黑匣子，并创造环境条件可持续改善的可能性。当地组织文化如何以及以何种方式体现或挑战法律的规范和条例？在专业/学院组织和官僚/等级组织中，什么形式的监督和控制在起作用，效果如何？这项研究还将扩大已经很重要的实验室实践民族志名册，同时关注调解科学，法律和政治世界的组织的创建和工作。参与者的观察，访谈和人种学分析将追踪对法规的解释和反应的变化，遵循设计新系统的委员会和管理人员的工作，环境健康和安全办公室的重组，以及采访大学和EPA的律师，他们谈判了同意程度。主要的现场工作将是在8个实验室和4个设施中进行为期一年半的日常观察，这些设施因机构结构、风险程度以及过去对EPA和OSHA法规的遵守情况而异。

This project studies the development and implementation of a new environmental, health and safety system (EHS) that resulted from a consent decree between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a major research university. This agreement is an example of a relatively new form of regulation seeking to promote better management of private firms in ways that meet legislated public goals. Although most regulation attempts to manage some activities of private firms, this strategy supplants more familiar policies that mandate either the use of specific technologies or specific levels of performance. Instead, the consent decree uses a management-based strategy that locates the design, standard setting, and implementation of regulation within the regulated organization itself, creating a form of private management in the public interest, or regulation at a distance. While much research tries to determine if regulation works and whether it is cost effective, too few studies have looked at the ground level - inside the organizations, at the shop floor level - to trace the behavioral and cognitive threads between the routines of daily work and government regulation. By observing the invention of the new EHS organization, its implementation, and dissemination across very different organizational units, the research will unpack the black box of regulatory culture by mapping the ways in which local cultures influence health and safety practices and create the possibility of sustainable improvement in environmental conditions. How, and in what ways, do local organizational cultures instantiate or challenge legal norms and regulations? What forms of surveillance and control operate, and with what effects, in professional/collegial versus bureaucratic/hierarchical organizations? The research will also expand the already significant roster of ethnographies of laboratory practices while focusing on the creation and work of organizations that mediate the worlds of science, law, and politics. Participant observation, interviewing and ethnographic analysis will trace variations in the interpretations and responses to regulation, following the work of the committees and administrators designing the new system, a reorganization of the environmental health and safety office, as well as interviewing the lawyers from the University and the EPA who negotiated the consent degree. The major fieldwork will be a year and a half of daily observations in eight laboratories and four facilities that vary by authority structure, degree of risk, and past compliance with EP A and OSHA regulations.