Operating as Experimenting
Synthesizing Engineering and Scientific Values in Nuclear Power Production
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5337760 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Constance Perin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 98-128 |
| Publication date | 1998-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/016224399802300105 |
| OpenAlex | W2047978449 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 65 |
Four hundred seventy-six nuclear power plants are in operation or under construction around the world. Are concepts for designing and operating plants safely sufficient? Conventional approaches are premised on expectations of predictability and control of radiation release and on assumptions that plant operations are closed systems. Field observations in the industry find, however, that the periodic necessity to refuel, test safety equipment, and continuously upgrade plant designs introduces challenges to control not originally calculated. The social and cultural contexts of markets, regulation, and work systems create additional contingencies. In this dynamic environment, reactor operations produce invaluable data about the states of the entire technology and organizational system. Rereading these dynamics as "experiments" suggests an alternative epistemol ogy that synthesizes science's values of doubt, discovery, and documentation with engineering's values of efficiency, optimization, and problem solving. This redefines plant-based risk handlers as ethologists, geologists, and anthropologists of an ecology of visible and invisible hazards
Documentation · Economics · Nuclear power · Nuclear power plant · Predictability · Upgrade · Computer Science · Engineering · Mathematics · Nuclear Issues and Defense · Risk Perception and Management · Artificial Intelligence · Ecology · Mechanical Engineering
Safety in unpredictable complex systems – a framework for the analysis of safety derived from the nuclear power industry
Designing trust
Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate
Learning from Incidents and Incident Reporting
Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power Industry
The Dark Side of Organizations
Organizations, uncertainties, and risk
The Challenger Launch Decision
Human Error
Thinking through Technology
What Engineers Know and How They Know It
Perceived Risk, Real Risk
The Vulnerable System
The Textual Approach
Organizational Culture as a Source of High Reliability
Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning
The Social construction of technological systems
Everything In Its Place
The Limits of Safety
The Nuclear Peninsula
Inventing accuracy
Risk and Culture
Drs. Pangloss and strangelove meet organizational theory
Manufacturing Certainty
Unruly Technology
Organizing and Managing Radioactive Waste Disposal as an Experiment
Commentary
Biotechnology and culture
The Sense of Grammar
Fatal Words
Science, Values, and Risk
Averting Catastrophe
Working in Practice But Not in Theory
Managing Risk
The Turn to Technology in Social Studies of Science
The Ad Hoc Collective Work of Building Gothic Cathedrals with Templates, String, and Geometry
Science as a Form of Action
The quantitative study of communicative success
The Mangle of Practice
Introduction
Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,22 |
| Citation span | 1999 - 2017 (19) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |