Behemoth – A peer-reviewed journal published by the Akademie Verlag, Berlin

Special Issue: Epidemic Orders

In the past few years, epidemic events, both actual and virtual, have made a spectacular comeback. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases such as avian and swine flu have generated great anxiety the world over, resulting in a pervasive sense of vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty. A powerful spirit of urgency, based on a genuine concern for human health and well-being, overdetermined by a variety of scientific, political, and economic interests, engendered a real flurry of action. In the epic battle against germs, the biopolitical state mobilized material and symbolic resources at an unprecedented scale.

In the shadow of the emerging infectious disease threat, significant shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research have occurred. The aim of this special issue of Behemoth is to offer an initial set of diagnostic accounts. What are the domains in which fundamental shifts have occurred over the past few years? Who are the actors involved and what are the underlying logics animating these shifts in public health, medical care, and scientific research? The key aim of this issue is to draw analytic attention to recent reconfigurations and to identify the kind of epidemic orders that are taking shape today at the heart of the biopolitical state.

Please send abstracts for this special issue of Behemoth to the editor Carlo Caduff (carlocaduff@access.uzh.ch) and to Kathrin Franke (behemoth@rz.uni-leipzig.de). Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 January 2010. Deadline for submission of articles: 30 June 2010.

But here just a quickie on Georgia. I happened across a chilling article — pasted in below — from a Russian news service. The article is an exhortation for the Russian army to go all the way into Georgia. Among many interesting and disturbing things, it calls for a strategic bombing campaign against Georgia:

“Obviously, entrenching Russia’s military presence in South Ossetia cannot be the goal of this war. A source from the SKVO told us: “We have to go all the way – destroy the runways at all airfields, including civilian airports – and all key railway nodes. Cut off Georgia’s supplies of gas, and its electricity supplies – with 70% of that coming from the Inguri power plant in Abkhazia. Make the ports at Poti and Batumi inoperable, along with the oil terminal at Supsa, and the railway lines to Azerbaijan and Turkey.”

The kicker? The model is the U.S. bombing campaign against Serbia:

“Ruslan Pukhov agrees: “The USA demonstrated in Yugoslavia what ought to be done in this kind of situation. It isn’t clear why television broadcasting and cell-phones are still functioning in Georgia. I hope Russia at least decides to establish a 10-15 kilometer buffer zone around South Ossetia, patrolled by infantry
as well as from the air.”"

Full article after the jump…

RBC Daily
No. 148
August 11, 2008
FIGHTING TO WIN
In the war with Georgia, Russia needs to go all the way
Retaining the status quo with Georgia would amount to defeat for Russia
Author: Viktor Yadukha
[Unless Georgia's infrastructure is destroyed, Russia risks losing
the war. And if that happens, the Russian authorities can forget
about a worthy place in the international arena and support from
the Russian public.]

Yesterday’s reports from South Ossetia shed some light on the
contradictory picture of this war. It turned out that although the
Russian media had reported the capture of Tskhinvali two days
running, it wasn’t fully taken by Russian troops until Sunday,
August 10. But there remains the danger that the Russian military
will stop there, allowing the Georgian military to regroup again
on the commanding heights and descend on Tskhinvali. The only
viable option in this situation is to drive the enemy back toward
Tbilisi; but no orders to that effect had been issued as at Sunday
evening. Reports of Russian air-strikes on military bases,
airfields, and ports in Georgia are mostly coming from Georgian
sources, and may turn out to be greatly exaggerated,
unfortunately. That’s “unfortunate” because unless Georgia’s
infrastructure is destroyed, Russia risks losing the war. And if
that happens, the Russian authorities can forget about a worthy
place in the international arena and support from the Russian
public.
The war has been under way for almost a week, but there are
still more questions than answers. It isn’t clear why there still
hasn’t been a firm order for Russian troops to drive the enemy
back into the Georgian heartland. “Not much information is
available, but to all appearances, we’re afraid of a negative
reaction from the international community,” says Ruslan Pukhov,
head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies
(CAST). Another possible reason is the condition of the Russian
Armed Forces. Pukhov says: “The North Caucasus Military District
(SKVO) is regarded as the most combat-capable district in Russia -
and we’re not in 1994 any more, obviously – but even now, our
troops aren’t in the best condition. To give Saakashvili credit,
his military is well-equipped and well-trained. Georgia has one of
the world’s highest per capita defense spending levels.”
Objectively, in the eyes of the West, Georgia’s genocide
against the Ossetians gives Moscow stronger formal grounds to
consolidate its military presence beyond the Great Caucasus Range
- and it will be harder for the Western media to ignore those
grounds. But statements from Russian officials indicate that
Russia has no techniques of its own in the media war with the
West: it’s the same old references to the impotent UN Security
Council, and the openly hostile OSCE and EU – with calls for
Saakashvili to face an international tribunal, as if anyone other
than Ossetians and Russians had the moral right to judge that
person. Neither does it inspire optimism to see Moscow unprepared
to confirm the bombing of military and transport infrastructure in
the Georgian heartland; and then there are the conflicting stories
about the Black Sea Fleet ships – either sailing along the
Abkhazian coast or approaching Novorossiisk.
Obviously, entrenching Russia’s military presence in South
Ossetia cannot be the goal of this war. A source from the SKVO
told us: “We have to go all the way – destroy the runways at all
airfields, including civilian airports – and all key railway
nodes. Cut off Georgia’s supplies of gas, and its electricity
supplies – with 70% of that coming from the Inguri power plant in
Abkhazia. Make the ports at Poti and Batumi inoperable, along with
the oil terminal at Supsa, and the railway lines to Azerbaijan and
Turkey. With support from aircraft, rocket artillery, and
infantry, tanks should be used to push the Georgian army back a
long way beyond South Ossetia. Russian paratroopers should land in
Abkhazia and Ajaria, to develop a reciprocal offensive, with naval
support. The finale should involve capturing Tbilisi and arresting
Saakashvili, who ought to have a $10 million reward on his head.
But that is not the case, and the prospects are uncertain.”
Ruslan Pukhov agrees: “The USA demonstrated in Yugoslavia
what ought to be done in this kind of situation. It isn’t clear
why television broadcasting and cell-phones are still functioning
in Georgia. I hope Russia at least decides to establish a 10-15
kilometer buffer zone around South Ossetia, patrolled by infantry
as well as from the air.”
A military source told us of apprehensions that Russian
troops, dug in amidst the smoking ruins of Tskhinvali, could be
drawn into years of sluggish positional crossfire, with an endless
supply of weaponry – which won’t stop unless Georgia’s
infrastructure is destroyed. And settling into that kind of status
quo would be equivalent to defeat for Russia. The whole world is
watching Russia’s actions closely. This war, which Russia couldn’t
avoid, is a test of Russia’s own viability as well as a test of
its combat capacities. The blood of thousands of dead Ossetians
will either entrench the outcomes of the USSR’s collapse
conclusively – or become a line marking the start of some new
history.
“Russia is prepared to tear Saakashvili and the Georgian
butchers to pieces,” said South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity
on August 10. “This is expressed in the way so many Russian
volunteers are gathering at the border with South Ossetia. It’s
been a long time since Russia saw such strong popular mobilization
and outrage. There are queues at the checkpoints, and not everyone
who wishes to fight is able to do so.”
Translated by InterContact

Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the `precautionary principle’ (Ewald), `preparedness’ (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or `pre-emption’ (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feature within the Australian political imaginary. We explore how the approach to the future entailed in the paradigm enframes `life’ and stifles democratic participation and innovation in ways of living. Three case studies (in biosecurity, bioecology and biomedicine) demonstrate not only how the paradigm pervades the government of everyday life, but also how it is challenged by human `agents’, material `life’ and the dynamic relations between these two. By formulating what this involves, we point to a concept of the political more conducive to democratic pluralism, diversity of life and innovative culture.

The rapid decline in housing prices is distorting the normal workings of the American labor market. Mobility opens up job opportunities, allowing workers to go where they are most needed. When housing is not an obstacle, more than five million men and women, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s work force, move annually from one place to another — to a new job after a layoff, or to higher-paying work, or to the next rung in a career, often the goal of a corporate transfer. Or people seek, as in Dr. Morgan’s case, an escape from harsh northern winters.

Now that mobility is increasingly restricted. Unable to sell their homes easily and move on, tens of thousands of people like Mr. Kirkland and Dr. Morgan are making the labor force less flexible just as a weakening economy puts pressure on workers to move to wherever companies are still hiring.

In 2007, the inter-state migration dipped at a rate of 27 percent compared to last year, highest decrease in the rate of inter-state migration in the last 15 years! This seems to hint at the re-conceptualization of the economy as an open systems with interacting sub-systems and non-economic domains. In this new way of thinking, the problem of government becomes how to manage these interfaces where different series interact and influence each other. In the last post and in our conversations on the management of the economy, Stephen and I have been arguing for a transformation in the conceptualization of the economy as a vital system that needs to be governed accordingly rather than simply intervened upon. In this perspective, crisis is external to the exogenous to the system, rather than endogenous as Keynesian paradigm would argue. In the Keynesian paradigm, the crisis located at the natural life cycles of capitalism; due to the need for large scale re-investment at the end of each business cycle, the balance of savings and investment gets obscured and unless intervened the economy rather than coming back to the equilibrium point fails to restore the market equilibrium. So, the solution is proactive government intervention with the goal of prolonging the business cycle. The problem is located within the very nature of capitalism. However, as we have been seeing in the housing crisis the problem has nothing to do with fixed costs of re-investment of the business cycle. It rather has to do with the mismanagement of risk, which seems to be an agent of translation between different domains. It is a way to manage an interface, i.e the housing market, and indirectly the labor market, and people’s seemingly non-economic needs of inhabitation. As we have been seeing, miscalculation of risk is posing great vulnerabilities to the economy as a vital system, and the problem of crisis manifests itself in terms of shocks disseminating from one sub-system to an other. Then I presume the problem becomes one of resilience and robustness of the interfaces connecting different domains within the economy: the ability to absorb unexpected, and yet immanent shocks. So, can we actually understand the neoliberal language of regulation, as opposed to intervention, in terms of the management of interfaces? Probably Stephen can tell us more with regard to risk.

One thing that was interesting was to see how a contradiction between different logics of security emerged in the case of the subway. Even though their analytical distinction between safety and systems security was a poor one, they tried emphasizing this distinction with a bias towards safety. I would argue that the weakest aspect of their work seems to be related to the vantage point through which they conducted the research and the modal order of their analysis. Since they conducted ethnographic research in the subway system, they focused on the safety problems that the personnel faced on everyday basis. From this vantage point, they also witnessed the pressure exerted onto these people from top, i.e. FEMA, DHS and the city council. By taking the perspective of the social, they criticized the absurdity of some of the security measures, such as the survailence system with thousands of cameras or the alarmed doors that are not connected to any other centralized alarm system. They simply dismissed the systems aspect of security as a ‘myth’ and a ‘ceremony’ that under the bureaucratic hierarchy of command and control one had to perform. Following this argument, they identified DHS utilizing the ideology of ‘command and control’. Their perspective also did not allow them to appreciate the role of external consulting agencies who are commissioned for developing subway security systems. When I asked about the role of OR and systems analysis in this process, in the talk the answer was a simple no, but then after the talk when a professor insisted on my point with a surprise that OR would not be involved, McLain admitted that outsourced consultants with military backgrounds (such a coincidence…) were involved.

Finally, as you might have already guessed their analysis was at the first order and they seem to see those consultants as competitors in a sense… For this reason, their analytical categorization was weak. What was interesting to see was, even though they did not qualify it in these terms, safety meant minimizing the perverse effects of the risks due to the practices that are necessary for operating a system in an efficient manner. Clearly, this was a local concern and the personelle had to improvise for achieving the optimum system, which involved putting themselves under risk. Security, on the other hand, was located at the aggregate level and this locatioinality meant that it did not necessarily fitted well with the logic of safety. Often times security logic seemed from a local vantage point absurd and meaningless, if not problematic for operating the subway system. Since their research was focused at the subway system itself, they did not have data regarding this aggregate level. But one might speculate subway security has to do with systems vulnerability and not safety.

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).

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.