From Safety First towards Security First? A Co-Productionist Analysis of Security Technologies and Processes within One Belgian Critical Infrastructure

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - II

Abstract

In the aftermath of recent terrorist attacks in Europe, high-risk industries have dramatically increased their investments in security enhancement. Security technologies such as fences, infra-red security cameras, fingerprints recognition systems and security processes like access control procedure and the “four eyes” principle have emerged, thereby disrupting these industries’ traditional modes of functioning. Whereas these industries originally focused almost entirely on production and safety stakes, they now pay increasing attention to security. Topics such as terrorism, drones attacks, insider threats, cyber criminality gain traction. This research presents results of an examination of the significant increase of security technologies and processes implementation, and their impacts within a nuclear research center. Drawing on qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups and ethnographies), it analyzes (1) the basic assumptions and values that inform these security technologies and processes, and (2) how these technologies and processes participate to shape the organization’s security culture, but also on other cultures (such as safety, innovation or environmental cultures). It mobilizes the idiom of co-production and the concept of technological cultures to comprehend what cultural elements are transcribed within the security technologies and processes. Moreover, such an approach enables us to account for how security, safety and innovation cultures are co-produced by human, technologies and processes as well as how those cultures are mutually constituted. Practically, it permits to get a better grasp on the impacts such processes or technologies might have on security culture as well as on other organization’s cultures.

Author

• Colin Glesner, univeristy of Liège