A New STS Hybrid Conceptual Framework: Understanding Unrecognized, Available, Pertinent Knowledge and Recurring Structural Failures

• In Event: Practical Limits of ANT and Explorations in Other Conceptual Frameworks

Abstract

Structural engineering (SE), a profession overlooked by STS scholars, possesses embedded traditions of knowledge acquisition and usage. It has been molded by forces outside the profession. Undergraduate education is only available as a specialty within civil engineering in which many required courses do not pertain to SE practice. In practice, the chronic pressures on minimizing cost often adversely affect decisions made during conceptual design, occasionally relying on extrapolation in the guise of innovation.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) provides a starting point for a conceptual framework to understand knowledge flow and recurring, often costly structural failures. A suitable conceptual framework needs to recognize and include influences from external actants, a chronology of events, a means to explain recurring structural failures, knowledge flow (or the lack thereof), feedback loops and subsequent network instabilities, etc.

Several recent, well-publicized, very different structural failures, all with the same root causes, are presented. For each, graphics are used demonstrate ANT's limitations. Then, graphics from a new hybrid conceptual framework are offered to demonstrate identification and understanding of root causes of these recurring failures. Also, "legacy" actants are introduced. One example is structural scale laboratory models whose sensor-recorded data are used as the bases of code requirements. These actants are designed, instrumented, and tested to failure with recorded data that live on, often with unintentional biases stemming from decisions made for their design.

This new conceptual framework is innovative, because it will lead to a broader, deeper understanding in sociotechnical studies of SE and other technical professions.

Author

• Julie Mark Cohen, Julie Mark Cohen, PhD, PE, SECB