Abstract
Diane Vaughan is a pathbreaking researcher who has helped to define the field of the sociology of accidents and disasters within complex technology systems. The publication of Dead Reckoning is a welcome new contribution to the field of organizational sociology and the sociology of system safety. Her guiding question throughout the research is this: The central puzzle is, what makes air traffic control so safe? . . . The book narrows in on controllers, and on the cognitive, technical, and material practices that they acquire during their training and deploy in everyday air traffic and emergencies. (pp. 4, 5)
Her ethnographic research leads her to a key conclusion: the fundamental factor providing resilience to the air traffic control system is the embodied socio-cognitive capacities and problem-solving abilities of the air traffic controllers themselves.
Vaughan’s method is that of sociological ethnography. She examines the nature of the workplace, the inter-actor practices and relationships that exist in a control tower, and the rules and values that govern the culture of the controllers’ work lives. This approach requires immersion in the working lives and workspaces of the specialist controllers who are the object of her study. Her fieldwork was remarkably intensive and extended, involving lengthy periods of ‘participant-observer’ research at four Boston-area traffic control facilities. Her results derive from several different research activities: structured and unstructured interviews of participants, surveys of a larger number of individuals working within the air traffic control system, and her own annotated observations of activities, events, and practices within the control rooms themselves. Vaughan establishes that the controllers operate on the basis of constantly updated mental models of the airspace they are controlling, projecting forward the locations of the aircraft in their space. She refers to this cognitive capacity as ‘ethno-cognition’ and a specialized kind of ‘interpretive work’. Much of her research time was devoted to observing this situated social cognition in action in several air traffic control centers, and in seeking to understand the processes through which ordinary men and women gain the specialized embodied cognitive skills to be effective air traffic controllers.
The ethnographic content of the book is its foundation. Vaughan’s ethnographies of the Boston Center and the Bedford Tower (chapter 5) and Boston TRACON and Boston Tower (chapter 6) provide the reader with a detailed understanding of the architecture of each of these facilities, the organization of work, and the controllers’ social, personal, and emotional experience of these workplaces. The level of detail she provides is impressive, and it serves to give the reader a very tangible mental map of the work processes and the technology management systems that underlie the central mission of ensuring ‘safe, orderly, and expeditious delivery of air traffic’ (p. 123) through airspaces to their destinations. In chapters 7 and 8, she turns to the ‘emotional labor’ involved in the work lives of controllers, and the human reality of a highly stressful environment in which the controllers do their work. Every human activity involves occasional mistakes, but in the air traffic control center, a mistake can lead to a mid-air or on-runway collision and substantial loss of life. Therefore, redundancy and resilience are crucial attributes of the system. Moreover, she points out that mistakes and errors are made more likely by the production pressures that exist within the air traffic control system, including especially the pressure to maintain on-time schedules for the airlines (p. 353) and budget pressures on the FAA to reduce staffing costs.
A key focus of the book is the making of air traffic controllers: the processes of training and inculturation through which new hires gain the skills, cognitive abilities, and reliable knowledge of the regulations and processes involved in air traffic control. Training and skill development are the focus of chapters 3 and 4, and Vaughan’s focus on ‘ethno-cognition’ and ‘social cognition’ on the part of the controllers persists through virtually all of the ethnographic studies and interviews provided in the book. Vaughan closely examines the embodied cognitive capacities and skills that air traffic controllers gain through experience and training. These points are crucial to her analysis of the air traffic control system, but they also shed important light on the topic of skilled performance in the workplace more generally.
Vaughan returns frequently to what she calls ‘boundary work’. The air traffic control system depends upon a highly specific set of rules about airplane behavior within specific parts of the airspace, in all dimensions (ground position, altitude, time). The task of the controller is to control the aircraft’s speed, altitude, and changes of bearing through voice instructions in order to maintain compliance with boundary instructions and continue toward the destination. But the concept of boundary work is broader, in that it refers to several different things: the boundaries in airspace that the controller has to constantly pay attention to, and the boundaries of responsibility that exist within the control tower and within the higher levels of administration of Federal air traffic safety management (p. 214). This concept plays a key role within Vaughan’s attempt to work out the details of the ‘socio-cognition’ and ‘situation awareness’ that develops for controllers through their training and work experience.
Vaughan gives extensive attention to the system consequences that resulted from two crises in the air traffic control system: the 1981 PATCO strike (the air traffic controllers’ union) during the Reagan administration, leading to decertification of the union and wholesale firing of the air traffic controller workforce; and the trauma created within the air traffic control system by the September 11 hijackings, terrorist attacks, and subsequent emergency closing of all US airspace for an extended number of weeks. Both events had major consequences for the workings of the air traffic control system, some obvious and others largely unanticipated. Chapters 9–10 provide extensive discussion of the events and system consequences of the September 11 attacks.
Vaughan began the book with a crucial question: why is the air traffic control system so safe? The complexity of the congestion of flights around major airports is daunting, and yet working teams of controllers almost always show their ability to collectively monitor the positions and flight paths of all these planes without allowing mid-air or runway collisions. This is a remarkable achievement. She has a specific answer to the question: the cadre of controllers who make up the system are the heart of its safe performance. ‘Controllers [are] the source of system resilience and consequently, persistence’ (p. 497). The controllers and supervisors have been effectively trained in the systems that have been developed to safely manage a rising number of airplanes in flight, and their ‘embodied cognition’ has been tuned to a remarkably high level through their work experience. Early in the book she refers to the impulse to ‘streamline’ staffing, and her strong recommendation is that this approach should be avoided at all costs. A lean organization in this domain will be an unsafe organization, and the consequences are likely to be tragic. She returns to this theme in Part VI (pp. 503 ff.). In 2013, the FAA was forced to cut $637 million from its budget, and subsequently implemented a one day per pay period furlough for almost all staff through the remainder of the fiscal year. This further reduced the human resources (controllers) whose expertise and knowledge were critical to maintaining safe air travel. This is a system problem, not an individual deficiency. Moreover, as Vaughan’s extensive analysis of the workings of the system demonstrates, the hope for a technological fix leading to a lower overall level of staffing is a techno-utopian fantasy. This is because air traffic control is not an optimization problem that can be handled algorithmically. Instead, it is a moment-to-moment process of cognition, dead reckoning, and problem-solving on the part of the controllers to manage the airspace safely. Vaughan puts the point succinctly in the final chapter of the book: the ethn-ocognition that underlies the air traffic control system is an inseparable mixture of standardization and improvisation (p. 559). Good technology is an important part of this process, but the resourceful and skilled controller cannot be replaced.
In short, Dead Reckoning is a definitive account of the history and workings of the air traffic control system. It is an important contribution to the sociology of complex socio-technical systems, and it illustrates the multiple pathways of contingency that lead to the formation of such systems. Most important, it sheds important light on the ways through which situated human beings provide the system with crucial resilience through their deeply embodied social cognition and their ability to improvise solutions in real time. The book will certainly take its place among the very best recent contributions to the study of complex socio-technical systems.