Petra Auvinen

Environmentally coupled repairs and remedies in the airline cockpit: Repair practices of talk and action in interaction

Our article explores the repair practices pilots use to correct various troubles during flights. The intersubjective understanding of action is a salient part of the time-critical activities of aviation. Repairs solve troubles before any accident risk emerges, thus contributing to flight safety. In repair practices, the social and technical environment is interwoven. If remedies concern faulty lines of action, they target the techno-material condition of the aircraft. Such repair practices are not repairs of talk, but remedies of action in a socio-material interaction. We discuss remedies of action as a particular type of repair practice, and outline their role in socio-material interactions. The aim is to continue building a holistic analysis of social action, not just to add a multimodal layer over an analysis of talk. The rethinking of social action contributes to the exploration of social actions anchored to their socio-material environment.

An Airline Checklist Use as a Sociomaterial Practice

Checklists form the basis of procedural standardization in the airline cockpit, with the help of which safety-critical measures become a routine part of flight crew task management. In this paper, we discuss the normal checklist use and its problems as a socio-material practice. We show how routine problems in checklist use are resolved, and point out how procedural and interactive backups function in action, thereby securing flight safety. We also examine the nature of problems in the checklist use that occur within the performance of individual checklists, within the order between checklists, and within the order between the checklist performance and other flight task activities. The problem types include premature, absent and excessive actions. The problems within checklists reveal troubles in the cognitive ergonomics of task design and logics of checklist use. The order problems between checklists appear as cognitive mis-performances, though cognitive overloading may have organizational grounds.

Shattering the Single European Sky: Argument from authorities in dealing with the SES initiative

ABSTRACTThe article scrutinises the European Commission’s Single European Sky (SES) initiative from a neoinstitutionalist epistemic governance perspective. The focus is on the rhetorical tools actors deploy in accounting for SES and the problems in it. We argue that the slow progress made in realising SES is not simply due to conflicting national interests. Member states are not uniform actors with a single, easily defined will or interest but rather, several entities appeal to national interests and other shared values to defend their position in the process. The delay in realising SES does not stem from the Commission’s inability to reconcile the distinct stakeholder interests but it is due to diverse discursive skirmishes the SES project has triggered. These skirmishes amount to a persuasion game whereby various actors account for SES in ways that do not endanger their own interests in the initiative, thus constantly transforming the SES project and its outcomes.