Institutional Logics, Expertise, Embodiment, and Ethnocognition: System Effects and the Production of Air Traffic Controllers

• In Event: 495 - Regular Session. Organizations: Actors and Decision-Making

Abstract

Based on three years of ethnography, interviews, and surveys in four air traffic control facilities in the FAA’s New England Region, this paper examines air traffic controllers’ lengthy and intensive training, in which people from all walks of life, with no common skills, backgrounds, or personality attributes, are transformed physically, cognitively, and in personality, developing common characteristics and skills that enable them to function in a highly predictable manner, coordinating activity with each other, pilots, and at the same time meeting the larger – and conflicting -system mandates of “safe, orderly, and expeditious delivery of air traffic.”
I examine system effects: the links between institutions, organizations, and individual interpretation, meaning and action. The training occurs is three distinctive stages, revealing the acquisition of skills and how they are transformed into expertise. In the final apprentice stage shows how the subtleties of the craft and the fine-tuning of the embodiment process occur. As a result of repetition and practice, the technical and cognitive skills and institutional logics necessary to the job become embodied to such an extent that controllers can work execute their skills automatically, without calculation, thus conforming to the competing institutional mandates for safe, orderly and expeditious delivery of air. In the concluding discussion, I consider the ramifications of this research for the sociology of expertise, organization theory, institutional logics, occupational habitus, and the human-technology interface.

Author

• Diane Vaughan, Columbia University