Symbolic Boundaries

The lecture shows the intersection of social and symbolic boundaries in air traffic control. Based on ethnography and interviews in four air traffic control facilities in the US National Airspace System, Diane Vaughan shows the interpretive processes and symbolic meanings by which controllers self-define as members of an occupational community, distinguishing themselves from other occupations. However, they also construct distinctions that separate members of the community, one from the other, based on the criteria of competence and technical skill, thus creating identity, legitimacy and status from their work. In these forms of boundary work, they deploy cultural, social, cognitive, and discursive mechanisms that impose, activate, transform, and suppress social boundaries, creating difference and similarity, cultural membership and group classification, in order to give legitimacy and status to some and marginalize others. Examining the mechanisms by which members of an occupational community construct differences that distinguish themselves from others and among themselves shows status dynamics: stratification as the product of agency, continuing negotiation in social relations to resist inequalities rather than solely an external apparatus acting upon agents.

Diane Vaughan ist Professorin für Sociology and International and Public Affairs an der Columbia University (New York, USA). In ihrer Forschung beschäftigt sie sich mit der Beständigkeit von Institutionen, sowie Fragen von Wandel, Kultur, Kognition und Agency. Insbesondere untersuchte sie in zwei umfassenden historischen Ethnographien US-amerikanischer Luft- und Raumfahrtorganisationen die Produktion von wissenschaftlichem und technischem Wissen in komplexen sozio-technischen Systemen über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA (1996) und zuletzt Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk (2021)