Sarah Maslen

Researching the Senses as Knowledge

ABSTRACT Research in the growing field of sensory studies has begun to identify the sensory aspects of experience, particularly in our engagement with material culture. What is yet to receive much attention is how the senses are acquired and used by individuals and communities, and how they inform action. Adopting barths argument that cultural phenomena are most productively examined as different kinds of knowledge, this article argues that the senses can be examined as any other knowledge source. This article demonstrates the value of examining the senses as knowledge through an account of learning to hear medically. This example is taken from a broader ethnographic study of the aural practices and experiences of ninety-two musicians, doctors, adventurers, and Morse code operators. It argues that hearing is learned, specialized, and specific to the places we go, the people that surround us, and the things that we do. To seek out the sources and value of this taken-for-granted aspect of our experience, it argues that the senses can be analyzed in terms of their foundations, their acquisition, and practice.

Knowing stories that matter: learning for effective safety decision-making

Ongoing safe operation of hazardous industries such as hydrocarbon production and transportation, air traffic control and nuclear power generation depends on effective decision-making by those in key positions. Safety studies often focus on the extent to which actions of operational personnel in particular are dictated by procedures or rules and hence reinforce the need for compliance to ensure the best outcomes. This article directs attention to a different area – the judgements made by experts in the cases that are not covered by rules and, in particular, the key role of stories and storytelling. This ethnographic research draws on literature related to high-reliability theory, organisational learning and naturalistic decision-making to examine how experts working in diverse critical contexts use stories to share and make sense of their experiences. It argues that such stories are vital to effective decision-making as a result of both the general and specific lessons that they embody. Our analysis shows that experts use stories as parables to nurture their ability to imagine possible outcomes and maintain a safety imagination. Stories are also embedded in work practices to support decision-making in the moment. Finally, stories are strongly linked to organisational learning for experts as a group and in mentoring less-experienced colleagues. We argue that the increased focus on incident reporting systems in hazardous industries, which is driven at least in part by a consideration of organisational learning, is failing in this regard because such systems do not facilitate story-based learning. We appeal to organisations to support story-based learning with as much vigour as formal systems for professional development and reporting.

Sensory work of diagnosis: A crisis of legitimacy

Abstract Sensory judgments have always been a part of medical practice, as sensory studies scholars have emphasized. However, in current regulatory, management and technological contexts, there is a push toward rational decision-making procedures and test-based evidence over clinical diagnosis. Sociological scholarship highlights that in focusing on explicit medical knowledge and disembodied data we take for granted aspects of healthcare work, including the ways in which health and illness is sensed. Research in sociologies of diagnosis and social studies of science and technology has captured that while the senses continue to play a role in medical work, the status and practice of this sensory work is not straightforward as evidenced by dual use of the senses and tests and the delegation of sensory work. Based on semi-structured interviews with expert doctors in diverse specialties, this article examines the sensory work of medical decision-making, with attention to its legitimacy. It examines applications of the senses from auscultation to ongoing sensing of patients’ bodies unmediated and via technological outputs. While critical to clinical judgments, there is discomfort with this sensory work in light of medico-legal pressures. I argue that the sensory work of diagnosis is vital, to the extent that gaps in sensory information imply gaps in understanding.

Experts under the microscope: the Wivenhoe Dam case

Prosecution of experts in the wake of disasters has emerged as common in the context of increasing social intolerance of risk. This paper examines expert blame using as a case study the decisions of engineers who operated Wivenhoe Dam during the Queensland floods in January 2011 and the criticisms of those decisions by the subsequent Commission of Inquiry. Our analysis draws on the literature on organisational safety, organisational learning and expertise to examine the relevance of the criteria against which the engineers were judged, the relevant competence of those who made this assessment and the broader implications of such exercises. Our analysis shows that lay judgements of expert practice can be misleading, as evidenced by the Commission of Inquiry’s misguided focus on procedural adherence. We argue that such inquiries—where the focus is on assigning blame—detract from opportunities to learn from incidents and can negatively impact on professional practices. If the aim is to make future disasters less likely, then inquiries that take this approach may be failing in this endeavour, or at least not maximising their contribution.

Telemedicine and the senses: a review

Telemedicine technologies have been presented as solutions to the challenges of equitable, cost-effective and efficient health service provision for over two decades. The ways in which the sensory dimensions of medical care and the doctor-patient relationship are mediated via telemedicine can be important contributors to the success, failure or unintended consequences of telemedicine. In this article, we present a review of the relevant literature in social research that provides insights into the sensory dimensions of telemedicine. In addition to considering important relevant work undertaken in the sociology of health and illness, we incorporate perspectives and research from other disciplines and fields that we believe can contribute to the development of scholarship on this topic. We contend that when doctors, patients and other healthcare workers enact telemedicine, sensory judgements have become, in part, a sensing of sensors. Viewing healthcare practitioners and patients as always and already digital data assemblages of flesh-code-space-place-affect-senses, demanding certain kinds of body work and data sense-making, constitutes a productive theoretical approach for future enquiries into telemedicine and other digital health technologies.

Organisational factors for learning in the Australian gas pipeline industry

Accident analyses have captured critical moments where warnings have been shown to go ignored, and the scale of what could go wrong misjudged. These shortcomings need not be viewed as individual professional failures. Rather, expertise and professionalism can be viewed as the outcome of the organisational and institutional contexts that support or inhibit them. This article argues that building expertise is a necessary and resource-intensive process that requires ongoing and largely informal processes that support professionals and maximise the connections between daily work and potential disasters. These processes and connections are most effective when supported by organisations structurally, through resourcing, through a culture of reporting and when lessons are used to update an organisation’s rules and procedures. These findings are based on semi-structured interviews with 34 engineers in the Australian gas pipeline industry.

Preventing black swans: incident reporting systems as collective knowledge management

In hazardous industries, disasters are mercifully rare and yet the potential is ever present. For this reason, companies and industries as a whole put substantial effort into gathering information about past small failures and their causes in an attempt to learn how to prevent more serious events. Despite these efforts, recent research has captured how organizations can ‘fail’ to learn. Disastrous events can become ‘black swans’ and remain unpredicted despite the existence of information warning of them. This article engages with this challenge by analyzing incident-reporting systems as a tool for collective knowledge. Drawing together the literatures on organizational knowledge management and incident reporting, we examine incident-reporting systems as used and as structured. We explore the potential use of incident-reporting systems for mediation and synchronization of knowledge within and across groups of professionals and organizations. We also address the social practices that translate information in databases into collective knowledge. Building on the work of Hecker, we argue that research concerned with incident reporting and organizational learning would benefit from using ‘knowledge’ and specifically ‘collective knowledge’ as its reference point. We show that conceptualizing this problem in terms of ‘reporting’ and ‘learning’ distracts attention from the knowledge needs for people to learn. We argue that we must ask: What do people need to know to play their part in major accident prevention? And how is that knowledge effectively shared? We conclude with an empirical research agenda in light of this investigation.

Layers of sense: the sensory work of diagnostic sensemaking in digital health

Sensory judgements have always been a part of medical practice and this sensory work is often entangled with technologies, from the stethoscope to digitised devices for advanced life support. This article investigates this sensory work and its entanglements with technological sensors in diagnostic practice. Based on semi-structured interviews, it presents a close analysis of practitioners’ use of anaesthetic monitoring and telemedicine. It argues that senses and sensors are recursively combined in the moment towards understanding. In this, digital technologies do not present self-evident data, but rather the practitioner must learn to sense the sensors to interpret health and illness. Sensory work (of both the senses and sensors) is not dispensable or entirely delegable because it is intimately entwined with sensemaking. The significance of sensory work to sensemaking reinforces the importance of its consideration in digital health sociotechnical assemblages.

The More-than-Human Sensorium: Sensory Engagements with Digital Self-Tracking Technologies

ABSTRACT In this article, we draw on findings from an empirical project involving talking to Australian women about their sensory and sensemaking engagements with digital health technologies. Adopting a new feminist materialist perspective, our analysis identified a series of relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities generated when our participants came together with digitized modes of self-tracking. The agential capacities engendered through and with these technologies included discovering and uncovering information, motivation, quantifying and automating data collection, distinguishing “false” bodily sensations from “real,” discerning patterns, and enhancing sensory capabilities. Working with these technologies, the women were able to access insights into their bodies, feel more in control of bodily activities by reflecting on this information and any patterns over time it revealed. The limitations of these sensory devices were also revealed in the women’s accounts. The devices sometimes closed off or challenged women’s sensory knowledge in ways they found less than useful or helpful, due to failings in the devices’ design or functionality. Our analysis, therefore, highlights the intra-action of enactments of human sensory responses as they engage with digital devices and digital data, including the ways in which these responses were extended, facilitated, or, in some cases, challenged.

The rise of defensive engineering: How personal liability considerations impact decision-making

Abstract Based on a survey of Australian engineers (n = 275) this paper examines the impact of personal liability considerations on engineering decision-making. Almost all respondents who make high-stakes decisions saw questions of liability as having both positive (90%) and negative (87%) impacts. Our analysis shows that awareness of personal liability acts to focus the attention of many engineers on the moral dimension of their work. However, it also encourages more expensive decision-making, inhibition of innovation and professional paralysis. We argue that while personal legal liability is a legitimate way to focus engineers’ attention on the potential impact of their work, a problem arises when decision-makers are held responsible for disasters over which they had little control. The focus then shifts to ‘defensive engineering’ practices that are aimed at limiting individual liability rather than disaster prevention. Legal processes that are seen to unfairly allocate blame do not encourage practices that support future disaster prevention.