Managing Risk: Managing Uncertainty in the British Nuclear Installations Inspectorate1

Abstract

New approaches to risk and uncertainty require a consideration of the collective nature of risks, how they are defined and managed, and how complex social organizations, especially regulatory bodies, are created and mandated to define, manage and reassure publics concerning these designated risks. Sociological analyses of risk should entail analysis of modes of enstructuration, and close ethnographically based descriptions of working institutions. This study explores aspects of the political economy of risks, the selective typification of risks, a regulatory body's practices, and the intra‐organizational relations that pattern risk management. Based on fieldwork, the two year plus study of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) in Britain, includes extensive in depth interviews, clippings and historical documents. The purpose of the Nil is to insure that the licensees who operate nuclear installations do so within the stated principles of safety and conditions of the license, and do so by reasonable practical means. The social construction of the management of risk is shaped by the larger political economy, the NII itself through evolving of its mandate, strategies and tactics, and by cultural assumptions about safety and trust in government. Two types of uncertainty shape NII's practices: background factors of importance affecting nuclear safety beyond their direct control, and foreground factors, some of which they claim responsibility for managing. The latter include technological questions, individual risks of radioactive exposure, and collective threats and risks (of cataclysmic accidents). Historical and field data demonstrate a narrowing and refining of the workings of the NII.: through enstructuring a pattern of roles, rules and resources are allocated to narrow objectives and goals; by evolving a set of beliefs or ideologies spelling out the political and moral obligations of NII and the industry the mandate is legitimated; and by employing a licensing strategy for insuring safety many potential paradoxes are obviated. Thus, the work of insuring safety in an extremely risky industry is seen to have been accomplished. Further investigation of the social construction of collective risk is urged.