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No time like this very second to point all you anthropology people (once again) to the debate about the role of your discipline in enlightening soldiers to the nuances and minutiae of cultures and cultural difference. As the debate about the army's Human Terrain System (HTS) gets uglier, I thought this would be an appropriate time to link us to some the antagonists. In one obscure corner you will find the work of one Ann Marlowe, writer of - not kidding - such works as "The Book of Trouble: A Romance" and "How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z", who has just published a scathing review of said HTS in the amusing slash scary Weekly Standard. (Dynamic link, so check it out fast!) In the Red, White and Blue corner, you will find the writing of a Mr. Dave Dilegge, editor of the curious and fascinating Small War Journal, who takes umbrage with Ms. Marlowe and hurls compelling counterpoints and blog daggers at her. And in the hipster corner, you will find the latest (rather blasé) blurb on the whole mess in the Danger Room. You will also find there links to Wired's continuing coverage of this increasingly heated discussion. So glad my discipline of sociology is untouched by internal strife or critique of its methods and social utility.

All: I am happy to make another introduction to our little group. Benjamin Hickler is a student in the joint Med. Anthro program at UCSF. He comes to us via Paul's seminar, and is now engaged in fieldwork. He recently sent me a description of his project -- of very great interest -- that I thought I would be great to share and discuss. Read on to see it! Biosecurity and Poverty Alleviation: Controlling Avian Influenza and Foot-and-Mouth Disease in the Lower Mekong Recent outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI-H5N1) and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Southeast Asia have created a situation where the same animals promoted by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to alleviate poverty in the region are now also viewed as biological reservoirs for intolerable disease threats to human heath and industry. Both diseases are the subject of transnational networks of experts working to identify risk factors, develop prevention and containment measures, and assess the impact of "biosecurity" (animal disease control) measures on the lives and livelihoods of rural poor communities. My dissertation is based on one year of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with two groups of participants with different relationships to animal disease control activities: 1) professional experts employed by FAO or partner organizations to work on biosecurity projects and 2) backyard farmers, livestock buyers, community leaders, and village animal health workers who have participated in FAO projects to control HPAI-H5N1 and FMD in the Lower Mekong. Using ethnographic documentation of local dilemmas, I show how contemporary biosecurity activities instrumentalize and rework human relationships, ranging from relations within households to political relations between citizens, communities, and the state. My findings illustrate the minor conflicts and major disconnects between community concerns in the countries of the Lower Mekong and transnational efforts to control HPAI-H5N1 and FMD. Avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease exemplify the intertwined social and biological destinies of people, their animals, and their animals' diseases. Mutated strains of avian influenza have been responsible for the largest human influenza pandemics of the 20th century, contributing to the development of modern public health infrastructure and, more recently, global pandemic preparedness efforts. Foot-and-mouth disease affects historically important domestic animals like cattle, goats, sheep, and buffalo and has been regarded as a scourge around the globe for hundreds of years. Today, the continuing circulation of strains of FMD virus in the Lower Mekong represents a multi-billion dollar threat to industries and national trade interests. My research shows how international concern with these two animal diseases has functionally linked-up poverty reduction and biosecurity activities in the region, in large part because both diseases affect animals promoted in "pro-poor" livestock policies. Both viruses also illustrate FAO's position that the Lower Mekong comprises a single ecosystem of flows of money, animals, people, and pathogens, regardless of the centuries of ethnic chauvinism and conflict that divide its nations. Indeed, animal diseases have provided a biological impetus for political cooperation between the four governments of the region, though disagreements remain about border responsibilities, information sharing, vaccination practices, and trade policy harmonization. FAO casts itself as impartial arbiter above the fray of politics, but my research documents how current transnational biosecurity arrangements are decidedly political, in the sense that they have both democratic and anti-democratic potential in the one-party states of the Lower Mekong. The political stakes of FAO collaboration with state partners on biosecurity projects extend from public institutional domains to the ostensibly private spaces of domestic life. International efforts to control avian influenza and foot-and-mouth disease have disrupted the idea of the household as a single economic unit with common interests, objectives, and access to resources. FAO employs experts to analyze the gendered dynamics between household members, animals, biological materials, resources, markets, and antimarkets, both when identifying risk-factors as sites of behavioral intervention and when evaluating the adverse impact of biosecurity measures on the lives and livelihoods of women, men, and children. Avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease figure into the (implicitly hierarchically ordered) relationships between state, community, market, men, women, children, and animals in different ways. Efforts to control foot-and-mouth disease target men and the interface between the spatial domains of the household and market. Outreach efforts generally employ male-dominated hierarchical networks of public life in the Lower Mekong, whether official state channels or informal patronage networks. In contrast, concern with avian flu has focused attention on spaces of biological interaction between humans and poultry, especially the gendered domain of the household. Illustrating the contemporary linkage between poverty reduction and biosecurity, women and children are now at the forefront of efforts to prevent human transmission of avian influenza as well as efforts to mitigate the adverse consequences of animal disease control measures on rural communities. Efforts to create a two-way channel of communication with women, who rarely have access to formal and informal networks of public life in the Lower Mekong, are transforming relations between citizens and states in the region. Biosecurity projects are citizenship projects; they impose rights and responsibilities in order to regulate behavior. The burden of animal disease control measures does not fall evenly on everyone's shoulders, perhaps especially when it comes to policing the porous biological boundary between humans and animals. This recognition is behind recent efforts to develop more participatory modes for governing poverty and animal diseases. FAO's work in the Lower Mekong is best situated within a larger shift in the way international financial institutions like the World Bank approach the problem of "development." Post-neoliberal strategies for delivering local accountability through a decentralized network of service providers and non-state organizations have now been embraced by neoliberals and activists alike. Of course, delivering on promises of community participation and accountability is far from straightforward in the absence of functioning civil societies. Furthermore, working to build capable and sustainable liberal institutions can have anti-democratic consequences in the one-party states of the Lower Mekong. My project uses interviews, group discussions, and ethnographic observations to document the conflicts, disconnects, and potential synergy between community concerns and transnational endeavors to control avian flu and foot-and-mouth disease. It contributes to a better understanding of concrete ethical and political situations that arise from otherwise abstract "global" developments and shows how relations between people are actively forged in interactions with animals, microbes, and biosecurity projects in the Lower Mekong.

A fishy effort is underway by the LAPD's counter-terrorism unit to map Muslim communities in the city. Drawing from census data, which does not capture religious affiliation of individuals or household, and other demographic information, the men and women in blue hope to be able to extrapolate the relevant information. It's a curious VSS issue not least of which because of the interesting tactic police officials have begun taking in understanding and characterizing potential threats at the local level. Quoting from today's LA Times article on the subject:

In outlining the program last week before a congressional committee, Deputy Police Chief Michael P. Downing, who heads the counter-terrorism operation, said the department's plan was designed to minimize the radicalization of Muslims in Los Angeles. Instead of relying on experts, he said, the mapping would produce a "richer picture" of the community and guide future strategies. "While this project will lay out geographic locations of many different Muslim populations around Los Angeles, we also intend to take a deeper look at their history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown, socioeconomic status and social interactions," he said. "It is also our hope to identify communities, within the larger Muslim community which may be susceptible to violent ideologically based extremism and then use a full spectrum approach guided by intelligence-led strategy."

So, in other words, poverty and isolation, coupled with more conservatively oriented mosques and a population under increasing scrutiny, should be able to produce a picture of the prototypical threatening Muslim - no doubt viewed as a kind of "vulnerability" within the larger societal fabric. The chief of police of the LAPD, William J. Bratton, had this to say in response to critics: "This is not . . . targeting or profiling... It is an effort to understand communities." Hmm. I have absolutely no objection to law enforcement incorporating demographic and census data at the population level into their purview and techniques -- I think it's rather a long time in coming and quite necessary. However, I do object to couching the obvious targeting of one religious community in these terms, utilizing these techniques. Seems to me that a better way to gain a kind of seamless integration with - and entree to - the Muslim community would be to actually reach out to members of those communities, consistently, actively and visibly, along with every other (non-Muslim) community! Talk about a good dual use strategy!! * * UPDATE - - NOVEMBER 15, 2007 * * The LAPD just decided to cancel the surveillance program. My analysis was whacky, but the program -- now DOA -- was odious. Have a look at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-muslim15nov15,1,7941397.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

In our work on the genealogy of vital systems security, Stephen and I have noted the importance of “imaginative enactment” as a form of VSS knowledge-production. Among other things, imaginative enactment is a method for determining infrastructural vulnerabilities in the absence of archival data on the historical incidence of what are termed “low probability, high consequence” events – such as a virulent influenza pandemic, a dirty bomb attack on a major city, a catastrophic earthquake, etc. One form of imaginative enactment that I’ve been looking at is the scenario-based exercise. These are role-playing games in which decision makers are faced with an urgent crisis sparked by an event (a terrorist attack, an outbreak of an infectious disease, etc), take action to intervene, and watch the results of their interventions unfold. In this post, I want to begin to explore the structure and history of this type of imaginative enactment – which was originally developed in the 1950s at RAND (along with everything else), and called the "political exercise." A recent example is the “Dark Winter” exercise held at Andrews Air Force base in June 2001, which simulated a smallpox attack on the United States. It was the product of a collaboration between the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense. The exercise was, its designers wrote, “intended to increase awareness of the scope and character of the threat posed by biological weapons and to catalyze actions that would improve prevention and response strategies.” Experienced political “decision makers” such as Sam Nunn and James Woolsey deliberated in a series of National Security Council meetings as the smallpox epidemic unfolded. Given a lack of sufficient vaccine supply, unclear lines of authority, and information breakdowns, the leaders did not have the means to halt the spread of the disease. A national catastrophe was the result. In the wake of Dark Winter, participants engaged in a series of briefings to policy-makers in the executive branch and congress. Although its direct influence is hard to estimate, the exercise is often cited as a significant event – before the attacks of 9/11 and the anthrax letters – in galvanizing the US government to increase its biopreparedness activities. My question here is: how does the exercise achieve its effects? It produces ‘experiential’ knowledge about vulnerability – that is, leaders’ experience of their own lack of knowledge and experience, which combines with the feeling of responsibility to produce a sense of helplessness in crisis. It targets this experience at the act of decision. To do this effectively, exercise designers must construct a plausible, realistic event in which the affect and judgment of decision-makers is invested. How does the method work? Where does it come from? I want to focus here on the role of what were called, in Dark Winter, the “exercise controllers.” These somewhat shadowy figures provide the briefings of facts and policy options that control the apparently contingent outcome of the scenario. Creating a "Twilight Zone"  CSIS began conducting “crisis games” in the 1980s, under the leadership of Robert Kupperman, a security policy intellectual with a background in operations research. Kupperman had been concerned about government readiness for crisis situations since his time in the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) in the Nixon Administration, where he worked on various natural disasters, the energy crisis, the wage price freeze, and terrorist events such as Black September. In this context, he developed an interest in the common structure of crisis situations, and in the development of techniques that could be used to prepare for them in advance. He argued that crises, however diverse, shared a number of common problems: the paucity of accurate information, the difficulty of communication among decision-makers, and a confusing array of authorities seeking to take charge of the situation. Such situations involved uncertainty about what was unfolding, coupled with an urgent demand for immediate action to alleviate the crisis. Flexibility for decision-makers depended on the extent to which the crisis manager had forecast the situation and invested in preparation for it. “As we begin to recognize the complex problems that threaten every nation with disaster,” he and two colleagues from OEP asked in 1975, “can we continue to trust the ad hoc processes of instant reaction to muddle through? (Kupperman, Wilcox and Smith 1975: 229)” In the 1980s, after a stint in the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Kupperman joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington DC think tank. There he was co-author, with R. James Woolsey, of a 1984 Report on “crisis management in a society of networks” called America’s Hidden Vulnerabilities. The report argued that the U.S. relied for its well-being on a sophisticated and intricate set of systems, or networks, for energy distribution, communication, and transportation. It noted recent disruptions of these systems, and warned: “A serious potential exists … for much more serious disabling of networks crucial to life support, economic stability, and national defense.” (Woolsey and Kupperman 1985: 2) At CSIS, Kupperman and his colleagues sought to persuade national security officials of the problem of network-vulnerability, and the need to develop techniques of contingency planning. One of their approaches was to hold scenario-based simulations of crisis situations, and invite officials to participate. The emergency exercise was a tool for demonstrating to leaders the vulnerabilities of critical systems. As he and Woolsey wrote: “If planning has involved the operating teams and managers (as it always should) these critical personnel gain an increased understanding of how the system works and, particularly valuable, how it is likely to behave under abnormal conditions. Training with crisis games and emergency exercises will augment this benefit significantly.” (Woolsey and Kupperman 1985: 16) In a 1987 New York Times article on the CSIS simulations, Kupperman argued that successful exercises had four key elements. First, a plausible scenario; second, a rapid sequence of events, leading to a feeling of pressure, a demand for immediate decision. This realism was linked to creating a sense of responsibility in participants: “We try to make the players feel personally responsible…We create a twilight zone; they know it’s not real, but they’re not quite sure”; third, participants: choosing experienced people; and fourth, having a “control staff” to simulate the real world (Halloran 1987). The Times noted the widespread use of the practice of simulation: “today, simulations have gone beyond military strategy to include politics, diplomacy, economic leverage, public opinion and the psychology of decision makers under the pressures of time, confusion and demands from every direction.” The emphasis in designing such exercises was not on predicting or preventing the occurrence of a crisis, but on the decision-making process of leaders once a crisis was underway. In his forward to the CSIS volume, Admiral Thomas Moorer wrote: “The CSIS crisis simulations are not designed to be predictive. Rather, they are intended to provide insight into policy dilemmas likely to plague national leaders during real crises and to identify key decision-making pathologies that could lead to unwanted escalation.” (Kupperman and Goldberg, viii) Plausibility, Not Probability What was crucial to a successful scenario was that the players take their decisions in the exercise seriously. One had to somehow persuade them to behave as if the simulation were the real thing. As Kupperman and his colleagues wrote: “One of the greatest challenges for game designers is to induce players to take their actions seriously without having any actual ability to force them to accept responsibility for their actions the way the president, Congress, or the Soviet Union might” (15). Here realism was a critical factor: “The more realistic the game design, however, the more absorbed the players become.” The point was to create a plausible – rather than a likely – scenario. As the CSIS authors write: “In developing the scenario, the main criterion was that of plausibility – rather than high probability – in what might occur rather than what would occur” (3). How was plausibility constructed? “A plausible crisis game must, therefore, realistically simulate a political environment characterized by intense time constraints, crosscutting political demands, and a high level of risk” (11). The experience of the realism of the event and its aftermath led to the absorption of responsibility: “Team players, therefore, bore the consequences of their acts in the domestic or global arena. NSC players experienced the threats, penalties, and opportunities posed by environmental factors through the control of informational input” (12). The reality-effect of the exercise depended not only on the plausibility of the scenario, but also on the interventions – during the event itself – of the “control group” – that is, the behind-the-scenes figures who provided the “results” of the official players’ interventions. Let me turn now to the history of the role of the “control group” in creating the sense of realism necessary for absorbing the players, for making them feel responsible for their decisions, and therefore for generating the experience of vulnerability necessary to a successful exercise. Designing Lack-of-Control Kupperman and his collaborators at CSIS named the RAND and MIT “political exercises” of the 1950s and 1960s as an important precursor to their simulations. The political exercise was invented in the 1950s at RAND by members of the social science group, led by Herbert Goldhamer. The political exercise differed from classical war games in that it involved the strategic calculations of political decision-makers rather than military planners. In the context of the Cold War and the catastrophic consequences of escalation, a key issue was of course how to avoid going to war. The focus of the RAND political exercise was thus political decision in crisis. Its developers, Goldhamer and Hans Speier, also distinguished the exercise from more formal, mathematical games. According to Goldhamer and Speier, the attempt to formalize political decision-making processes in crisis “was abandoned when it became clear that the simplification imposed in order to permit quantification made the game of doubtful value for the assessment of political strategies and tactics in the real world.” In contrast to such simplification of the international situation, the political exercise made it possible “to simulate as faithfully as possible much of its complexity” (Goldhamer and Speier 1959: 72-3). Goldhamer and Speier decided not to depict the present, but to design scenarios as projections into the future, in order to avoid entwinement with current events. The scenario, they wrote, was an “effort to describe how the world of January 1, 1957, would look. It provided the players with a common state of affairs from which to begin. The scenario rid them of the intrusion of current news into the game and served to focus it on problems of special analytical interest” (74). Uncertainty and contingency must be experienced – this gives players a sense of responsibility for their decisions. Thus the exercise provided players with “new insight into the pressures, the uncertainties, and the moral and intellectual difficulties under which foreign policy decisions are made. This, of course, is part a tribute to the earnestness and sense of responsibility with which the participants played their roles, since otherwise these pressures and perplexities would not have made themselves felt” (79). How then to generate the experience of uncertainty? A key requirement of the game, for Goldhamer and Speier, was the “simulation of contingent factors” - what they called “nature”. As they wrote: “In political life many events are beyond the control of the most powerful actors, a fact designated in political theories by such terms as fortuna, ‘chance,’ ‘God’s will,’ ‘changes in the natural environment,’ etc. We tried to simulate this by the moves of ‘Nature.’” Referees played the role of Nature: “This arrangement…. Permitted the referees to make certain non-governmental moves which constituted indirect, partial evaluations of the state of affairs that had been reached at any chosen point of the game” – “the referees could introduce such evaluations in the form of press roundups, trade union resolutions, intelligence reports, speeches made in the United Nations, etc” (73-4). “The role of ‘Nature’ was to provide for events of the type that happen in the real world but are not under the control of any government: certain technological developments, the death of important people, non-governmental political action, famines, popular disturbances, etc.” (73) Dissemination The method developed at RAND was then disseminated in academic and policy arenas, as the field of “strategic and international studies” was institutionalized (see Kuklick). Goldhamer and his fellow developers collaborated with colleagues at SSRC, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford, Yale, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at Princeton, the Brookings Institution, Northwestern and MIT (80). Political scientist Lincoln Bloomfield became an enthusiastic developer of the methodology at the MIT Center for International Studies in the 1960s – he saw the political exercise as a possible solution to the search for “ways of bringing to foreign policy planning some of the imaginative analytical techniques employed by military planners and operational analysts.” The purpose of the games was four-fold, he wrote: to throw light on hypotheses about foreign policy and strategy; to pre-test strategies of action; to “discover unanticipated contingencies, alternatives or possible outcomes as a consequence of the interaction between conflicting strategies in the simulation”; and to “examine closely one line of policy action that illustrates vividly what a single plausible outcome might resemble in detail” (Bloomfield and Whaley, 1965: 887). Bloomfield and his group took up from the RAND design the practice of having a control group enact “nature” as the source of contingency. As they wrote, the control group “represents ‘nature,” introducing unexpected events; it is umpire, ruling on the plausibility and outcomes of moves; it is, as it were, ‘god,’ requiring the players to live with the implications of their chosen strategies” (858). Although they did not name it “nature” or “god,” CSIS emphasized the central role of the “control strategy” in creating the realistic situation of crisis in which unpredictable events are unfolding in real-time, and demand immediate response. “In formulating control strategy, the research group sought to pose to the team a number of functional problems, which would reflect key dimensions of crisis dynamics. This was done by simulating organizational impediments, domestic political impediments, problems of allies and regional actors and, finally, issues invoking U.S.-Soviet coercive diplomacy” (Kupperman and Goldberg, 1987: 12). In an exercise simulating a crisis on the Korean peninsula, the “the control group deliberately structured a leaky news environment to heighten the tension, as well as the realism, of the exercise” (18). The control group’s input demonstrates the lack-of-control of the decision-makers in a crisis situation for which they are not prepared – and generates strong affect (“tension”) among participants. References Bloomfield, Lincoln P. and Barton Whaley, “The Political-Military Exercise: A Progress Report,” in Orbis VIII: 4 (1965), 854. Goldhamer, Herbert and Hans Speier, “Research Note: Some Observations on Political Gaming,” in World Politics, October 1959. Halloran, Richard. “The Game is War, and it’s for Keeps,” New York Times, June 1, 1987. Kupperman, Wilcox and Smith (1975). “Crisis Management: Some Opportunities,” in Science 187. Kupperman, Robert H. and Andrew Goldberg, Leaders and Crisis: The CSIS Crisis Simulations: a report of the Arms Control and Crisis Management Program (Washington, 1987). Woolsey, James R. and Robert H. Kupperman, America’s Hidden Vulnerabilities: Crisis Management in a Society of Networks (1985).

It's hallucinatory Friday in VSS land -- and that must mean DARPA. Wired has an article about a $1.3 million contract to Lockheed for an "Integrated Crises Early Warning System." They are seeing this, it seems, as a kind of "situational awareness" -- but one that has less to do with enemy positions and more with, well, the social. " David Honey, who is the head of DARPA's Strategic Technology Office is quoted in the article as saying that "Commanders will always need to have an accurate picture of enemy positions, as well as friendly units and allies. But increasingly it’s social, cultural, political and economic information, foreign language capabilities and other clues – that are proving essential." And who better for that than Lockheed? Interestingly, the article points out, there is a history of similar efforts. For example, an integrated crisis warning system that was funded by the agency in the 1970s, and some other more recent efforts, including the ACUMEN (Anticipatory Culture-Based Modeling Environment) model, from which the diagram above is taken. But actually it was something else in the article that really caught my eye. Wired makes a joke about "forecasting riots" -- like the weather, ha ha. But in fact, as we have been finding out in our work on the Office of Emergency Preparedness, in the late 1960s and early 1970s it does seem that models of riots and models for things like natural hazards occupied a common space -- or, more accurately, they were modeled using similar techniques. Hopefully we will have more to say about this when we start moving through the mountain of material that Onur and Brian brought back from the archives.

An interesting article in Time magazine on response to floods in Tabasco reports that the Mexican Government did an admirable job when compared to the response to Katrina in the United States. Among other things, it seems that the military was out in force two days before the worst of the flooding, and was constantly running rescue operations during the entire event -- a stark contrast to New Orleans, where, as we know, getting military and national guard rescue into gear was problematic and slow.

One of the things I would like to do more on the blog is to introduce the work of various people we know and run into who are doing work related to vital systems security. I wanted to start by introducing a PhD student I met in Finland last year named Antti Silvast. Antti, who has a background in engineering, is working on the question of electric system reliability, particularly against the background of deregulation and increasing concerns about critical infrastructure protection. As will be immediately evident, Antti's work is very much connected to concerns that have been central to the collaboration. Read on for a description of Antti's work that he sent along.

Let's start with a question. Picture yourself a professional of a large infrastructure system that is vital to modern collective life, but whose breakdowns cannot be avoided. What can you do about it? This is the subject of my sociology PhD dissertation for the University of Helsinki, which studies the reliability professionals who are trying to mitigate electricity blackouts in Finland. I will examine the work of these experts in two field sites: in reliability-related seminars and through interviews. Some of the interviews will be conducted in the surveillance rooms where electricity production and consumption is balanced.  There are three major shifts that make the contemporary electricity industry an interesting topic for social research. First, electricity utilities have been opened to competitive entry and market regulation in Finland and all over the EU, which has created debates about how the utilities' emergency capacity is funded. Second, the behavior of electricity users – as switchers of their energy suppliers on the electricity markets, as energy-efficient users, as prepared for and "situation-aware" during blackouts, or as purchasers of personal emergency and standby power systems – has acquired much more importance than before. Thirdly, there is an ongoing "securitization" of unbreakable electricity supply and ICT systems, as evidenced by the discussion on critical infrastructure and vital systems security in Finland and in EU.  All of these changes have implications for the electricity reliability experts, who have to take actions in a different environment from the previous backdrop of universal service provision to all users on equal terms. Resembling the idea of reflexive modernization by Ulrich Beck, it has become impossible for the experts to define reliable electricity supply just scientifically or based on technological knowledge.  My take on the reliability professionals and their handling of risks will draw on pragmatism. The successful function of infrastructure systems is an active achievement of professionals, material devices, markets, regulations and organizations.  The core task of my research is to discover how reliability experts control and reflect upon their working habits, especially in relationship to other than technical framings of problems. It is a markedly distinct approach from the mainstream approaches on risks with their overemphasis on discrete, "rational" or "socio-cultural" decisions.

My work thus far has focused on writing an introduction to the work and gathering data: I have four interviews and notes and/or recordings from three seminars.  My key question at the moment is how to continue on getting the data. Should I try to get as diverse set of data as possible, interviewing different organizations and different experts? Or should I aim for a deep but narrow approach, spending time in the same recurring seminars and interview the same experts over again? Any help on this question would be appreciated. Also linking my research to the situation in the US would help a lot.

Here is the GAO report on the US government's ill-conceived attempt to fund the development of a second-generation vaccine for anthrax.