Diane Vaughan, Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk

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. 1194166 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194166International SociologyReviews: Organizations and Labour review-article2023