Negotiating the Non-Negotiable: Managing Nuclear Safety in the US After Fukushima

• In Event: Good Grief! Disasters, Crises, and High-Risk Organizational Environments

Abstract

This essay addresses the principle of nuclear safety through a framework linking the research literatures on high reliability organizations, social systems theory, science and technology studies, and rhetorical boundary work. The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant has reopened important questions regarding organizational and institutional communication, systems of regulation and governance, and the assurance of nuclear safety. This moment offers opportunities for improving communication practices and for expanding communication theory. Although nuclear safety is often said to be a “non-negotiable” principle, such claims disregard the degree to which it is constituted through communication and the degree to which that communication is fundamentally negotiative in form. Accordingly, the essay conceptualizes nuclear safety as a negotiated and paradoxical accomplishment within complex sociotechnical systems, extending the concept of high reliability organizations to a larger system level and linking it with heuristic concepts from Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory.

Author

• William J. Kinsella, North Carolina State U