Framing Technical Decision-Making

这笔赠款将支持一个以研究为导向的培训计划，在三年内每年培训三名博士生，学习在潜在后果很高且技术、制度和政策选择都存在争议的问题领域研究紧急社会技术系统的方法和途径。该项目旨在为他们提供更广泛的视角和潜在的应用工具，在为他们的教育提供背景和目的的研究环境中。根据情况和过去的历史和个别学生的培训，该计划将提供一年或两年的支持，因此总共将培训6至9名研究生。协调研究的重点将集中在以下问题上：既要掌握足够的技术和科学专门知识，又要掌握以案例为导向、以行为者为中心的方法，以修改、推广和补充最常用于分析类似情况和问题的公共政策和组织理论的工具；培训将侧重于阐明行为者在正式决策过程内和之外的观点，以及确定和分析这些观点的功能和业务影响。政治学和组织社会学的方法将与其他方法相辅相成，如文化分析、组织民族志和参与者观察，这些方法来自更多以行动者为导向的社会科学学科，还将教授改编自社会建构主义和叙事和话语分析的理论和方法，以支撑田野调查和民族志。最初的问题重点将是更好地理解两个政策领域，这些领域有争议的辩论和缺乏解决的历史，风险和不确定因素仍然公开和令人不安：高水平核废料处置的操作系统的设计；以及过剩武器级钚的管理。这一领域的初步工作已经揭示了技术和政策精英之间三种不同的背景背景，每一种背景背景在内部都是连贯的，每一种背景背景都会产生看似合理的结果，每一种背景会产生不同的政策建议和偏好。这些相互矛盾的观点不仅为政策制定创造了动荡的环境，而且也为组织和机构设计的选择和规范创造了动荡的环境。从放松管制下的空中交通管制和电力公司运营等工作中提取的其他案例也将被用作培训的范例，并将为未来的研究提供有前景的途径。该项目的目的是为来自广泛学科和不同智力背景的学生提供工具，以更好地理解学习行动者信念、文化、网络和互动的重要性和相关性，以及出现的组织和机构将在多大程度上将这些潮流纳入、表现或编码为构成或操作要素。将叙事和以行动者为中心的分析方法与更常见的制度、结构和行为方法相结合，应该为现在和未来的组织和机构反映和解释其社会和政治环境或未能反映和解释其社会和政治环境的方式和方法提供新的见解。

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.