Safe Science: Governing Green Laboratories

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project studies the development and implementation of a new environmental, health and safety system (EHS) that resulted from a consent decree between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a major research university. This agreement is an example of a relatively new form of regulation seeking to promote better management of private firms in ways that meet legislated public goals. Although most regulation attempts to manage some activities of private firms, this strategy supplants more familiar policies that mandate either the use of specific technologies or specific levels of performance. Instead, the consent decree uses a management-based strategy that locates the design, standard setting, and implementation of regulation within the regulated organization itself, creating a form of private management in the public interest, or regulation at a distance. While much research tries to determine if regulation works and whether it is cost effective, too few studies have looked at the ground level - inside the organizations, at the shop floor level - to trace the behavioral and cognitive threads between the routines of daily work and government regulation. By observing the invention of the new EHS organization, its implementation, and dissemination across very different organizational units, the research will unpack the black box of regulatory culture by mapping the ways in which local cultures influence health and safety practices and create the possibility of sustainable improvement in environmental conditions. How, and in what ways, do local organizational cultures instantiate or challenge legal norms and regulations? What forms of surveillance and control operate, and with what effects, in professional/collegial versus bureaucratic/hierarchical organizations? The research will also expand the already significant roster of ethnographies of laboratory practices while focusing on the creation and work of organizations that mediate the worlds of science, law, and politics. Participant observation, interviewing and ethnographic analysis will trace variations in the interpretations and responses to regulation, following the work of the committees and administrators designing the new system, a reorganization of the environmental health and safety office, as well as interviewing the lawyers from the University and the EPA who negotiated the consent degree. The major fieldwork will be a year and a half of daily observations in eight laboratories and four facilities that vary by authority structure, degree of risk, and past compliance with EP A and OSHA regulations.