The sky in a room: working practices of Air Traffic Control Officers

Since Vaughan’s seminal work (1996; 1999), social scientists have shown that risk is not an objective fact but it is rather a social construction defined by subjects and grounded on their actual experience and local contingencies (Catino, 2004). Drawing on this theoretical framework the paper presents some findings of an ethnographic research concerning Air Traffic Control Officers (ATCOs) working in four different air traffic control facilities in Italy. As other professionals in High Reliability Organisations (HROs), ATCOs have to provide real-time risk analysis and safety assessment (Vaughan, 2002), while coordinating with pilots and other controllers, both inside and outside their facility, with the possibility of harmful consequences in case of mistakes. A practice-based study of situated action (Suchman, 1987; Vaughan, 1998; Bruni, Gherardi, 2007) has been adopted in order to understand how ATCOs approach to risk, making sense of what they see on the radar, detecting and interpreting signals of potential danger and promptly correcting possible anomalies (Vaughan, 2002). To this end, we looked at the interactions between professionals and technological artifacts, team working and cooperative practices, processes of communication and coordination. The attention will be focused on the ‘creative use’ of technological artifacts, the role of local knowledge and scripts in the process of sensemaking (Weick, 1995), labeling, the importance of social redundancy and proactive behaviours, the institutional evolution in favour of a no blame culture, but also the leeway of ‘negotiation’ between the safety first culture and the optimization of air traffic fluidity