Review of Roland Bal and Willem Halffman (eds.), The Politics of Chemical Risk. Scenarios for a Regulatory Future. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998, 367 pages.
In many Western countries in recent years, public authorities have been faced with major crises of credibility regarding their ability to adequately manage environmental and public health issues, based predominantly on scientific and technical advice. In controversies concerning BSE or transgenic products, for example, the relationships between science and politics have been at the center of the debate. These controversies have clearly indicated that uncertainties in science impose limits to political or regulatory solutions rationalised on technical grounds. Additional evidence indicates that public trust is a pre-condition for effective decision making. These notions, which have been acknowledged by STS researchers for at least two decades, have recently become more distinct to the public, and hopefully also to policy makers.
The Politics of Chemical Risk. Scenarios for a Regulatory Future, edited by Roland Bal and Willem Halffman, has chosen a more traditional theme than the regulation of BSE or of transgenic products. It inquires into the relationships between risk assessment (science-based evaluation), and risk management (policy-oriented or regulatory decision). Analyses of the tensions at this interface are undertaken in the light of a variety of national and international regulatory systems and cultures, with different styles of using science, and different ways of doing politics. Although the theme is not unusual (in the editors’ own words), the perspectives from which the authors look at it are, in my view, rather innovative. The book indeed brings in new insights and thoughtful theoretical and policy-oriented suggestions for a regulatory future in the area of chemical risk that may be of use for both social and policy researchers, and regulators in this, as well as in other public policy areas.
In their introductory remarks, the editors recall that the separation between science and policy in the evaluation of chemical risk has been instrumental, particularly since the 70s, in the legitimation of the regulation of chemicals. Social analysts, however, have questioned this separation by focusing on risk assessment and management as social constructs. One basic proposition of this book is exactly to combine the approaches from the natural and the social sciences, with a view to improving the regulation of chemical risk. In promoting the building of such a bridge, the endeavour of The Politics of Chemical Risk. Scenarios for a Regulatory Future appears to be much in line with present efforts within STS studies to put social research to practical policy use.
The book is based on a workshop. Its contents, however, represent more than just a record of proceedings . The volume contains a collection of original papers authored mainly by academic researchers, but also by regulatory scientists, and public administrators. The editors’ work in the structuring and balancing of the book’s contents, and in introducing constructive suggestions for improving regulation, deserves special reference. Parts I, II and III are preceded by an introduction, and succeeded by a summary of the discussions that followed the presentation of the corresponding papers at the workshop. Part IV consists of a reflection on scenarios for regulatory policy. At the end of the book, the editors tell us the story of the rationale, the organisation, and the dynamics of the workshop, in a set of very useful and inspiring notes.
Part I addresses the Risk Assessment/Risk Management boundary, a topic which in fact pervades the whole book. Part II looks, in a comparative perspective, to the National/International arenas. Part III’s object is Standardisation. Part IV, authored by the editors, presents the Scenarios and Reflections for a regulatory future.
Most of the articles included in this volume provide evidence that scientific data used as a basis for chemical risk regulation, despite their apparent (quantified) precision, and the rhetoric that often accompanies their use, are the result of presupositions and choices, and involve considerable uncertainties. As pointed out by Sue Mayer and Gillian Glegg, in the first paper of Part I, while ecotoxicology’s function has been to supply scientific data for use in decisions about chemicals control, by defining the amount of a chemical that may be discharged, seldom does sufficient data exist to carry out a complete assessment of both the chemical, and its receiving environment. Besides, the ways in which such uncertainties are interpreted are unknown, which obscures the boundary between risk assessment and risk management (p. 15). That notwithstanding, scientists themselves usually regard the establishment of relevant standards as a technical problem, away from politics and economics, and tend to minimise uncertainties (p. 19). This attitude is often coupled with a propension to give industry the benefit of the doubt (p. 20-21).
Following a similar line of argument, Mark Piney calls attention to the contrast between the rhetoric of the standard setting process for occupational exposure limits (OEL), that considers the health effects of toxic substances, and the fact that potential risks to health are balanced against the practicabilities of control (p. 48). The capabilities and costs of current control technologies and methods, current exposure levels, the technical and financial situations of the industry, the relative organisational ability and power of the groups involved in the OEL setting process, as well as the perceptions by the standard setters of the seriousness of the health effects — all these factors underlay the standard setting process (p. 55-56). Thus, political aspects clearly enter risk assessment.
The risk assessment/risk management divide is, after all, a myth , argue Mayer and Glegg, and the real question is how to have it recognised that choices behind risk assessment ultimately are political choices (p. 23). It would, therefore, be in the domain of democratic responsibility to make judgments about how much uncertainty over risk we wish to tolerate in relation to particular products and processes (p. 24). For the sake of clarity and effectiveness of regulatory procedures, Piney also claims there s a better separation to be made between science-based health-based standards, on the one hand, and reasonably practicable exposure limits and associated specification standards, on the other.
Roland Bal examines how organisational formats and mandates, what he calls the rationalistic repertoire , affect the role of different partners involved in the development of standards for occupational chemicals, thereby institutionalising the boundary between science and non-science. His history of the Dutch system shows that the institutionalisation of OELs definition and the setting of a structure where experts, interest groups and policy makers were represented, with no clear organisational boundaries between assessment and management functions, led, with time, to recognising the need for a neater boundary. This boundary became one of the main sources of the procedure’s legitimacy. But the need to find ways to deal with uncertainties in scientific data across that boundary remained (p. 86).
Part II addresses the political aspects of harmonisation of standard setting at European and international levels. The central issue here is the implications of Europeanisation and internationalisation of regulation for the risk assessment/risk management distinction. The starting assumption, as laid down in the introduction to this chapter, is that the European Union regulatory system seems to favour technocratic forms of expert advice (p. 117).
In the first article of this part, Vic Feron recognises that even relatively well structured systems, such as the Dutch system for the definition of occupational standards, are confronted with the difficulties raised by poor toxicological databases, procedure delays, and inconsistencies of evaluations. One crucial message coming out of this paper is the importance of the experts’ experience (a different concept from that of expert knowledge), and open-mindedness to compensate for those limitations, both in the national and the international instances (p. 128). The author’s belief in the wisdom of experts and their capacity to promote understanding and, ultimately, the required consensus in risk assessment, across communities and nations, does not seem to depart much from the concept of epistemic communities . This notion, which has been helpful in explaining the role of scientific expertise in international organisations, might, in my view, also provide insights into the role of expertise inside EU regulatory committees.
Like Roland Bal in Part I, Karel van Damme also takes an institutionalist approach to focus on two different legal frameworks under which standard setting is carried out within the EU: Articles 100 and 118 of the European Union Treaty, which deal respectively with the harmonisation of regulation in the single market, and with health protection of workers under the EU social policy. Whereas under Article 118, a clear separation between health-based and feasibility considerations appears to be guaranteed, under Article 100, the provision of scientific advice for the classification and labelling of chemicals is largely dependent on the industry (p. 148). The comparative study of the two procedures leads the author to conclude that risk assessments under Article 118 better meet the criteria of objectivity, impartiality and non-neutrality (to protect public health), than Article 100. Article 100 procedures are criticised, in particular, for facilitating the dominance of manufacturers, with the exclusion of certain sciences, as well as certain publics , and to be more prone to political pressures.
The contribution by Robert Nilsson brings in the special case of Sweden, and the tensions that the social and political features of this country are beginning to raise for EU standards harmonisation. Environmental extremism, with low levels of acceptance of risks, and a highly centralised and powerful regulatory system, have led Sweden to introduce a number of chemical bans and regulations with no parallel in other EU countries, and the EU (p. 162). Stringent controls on industry, in particular, depart considerably from the common trend in the EU. As other papers in this book show (e.g. Mayer and Glegg, and to some extent also Irwin et al.), uncertainties involved in risk assessment tend to be interpreted so as to favour industrial interest. Not surprisingly, differences between the regulatory practices of Sweden and the EU have been at the core of political tension. Nilsson believes that Swedish participation in the EU will lead to a better balance of power (in favour of industry, in this case) between regulators, citizens, and industry.
Sheila Jasanoff attempts to answer the difficulties of harmonising standards across countries and cultures by putting forward a suggestive concept of harmonisation as reciprocal commentary . By reciprocal commentary she means the exchange, among partners in this process, of qualitative (not only quantitative) information about prior practices, through feedback mechanisms that may enable appreciation of successes or failures across countries, thereby promoting cross learning and understanding of institutions’ culture and history (p. 174). Lessons drawn from constructivist analyses could, in her view, serve to improve standard setting processes, particularly in international contexts marked by greater socio-cultural, economic and political differences among partners (p. 186). Letting the messiness of politics back into harmonisation , concludes Jasanoff, may well be more productive in many cases than leaning too hard on the supports of science - especially at a time when science is faced with a problem of credibility, one might add.
Part III begins with Patrick McCutcheon’s description of the standardisation of tests and assessment protocols for the regulation of chemicals at European level. The author focuses on the procedures for delivery of data by industry, the selection of priority substances according to relative risk, the evaluation by rapporteurs, and the function of governmental committees (p. 220). McCutcheon’s central point is the role of expert judgment throughout all this process.
Irwin et al. address the workings of regulatory science in the field of agro-chemicals in the United Kingdom, under the impact of European regulation. Regulatory science, the authors argue, presents a number of special features, namely its location, its ethos and its contents. As could be expected, the institutional location of regulatory research is industry. This institutional context shapes the ethos of this kind of research (p. 245). The consequences of this status quo for the intermingling of science and economic interests are not hard to perceive. The traditionally secretive and informal nature of the British regulatory system, and its close relationships with the private sector, seem to have helped the features of U.K. regulatory research to survive for a long time. The authors, however, point to the impact of the EU regulatory environment on U.K. firms. These firms have had to adapt their practices in order to comply with the more formal and demanding requirements of European harmonisation.
Peter Calow goes further into the deconstruction of risk assessment. Before any risk assessment can be undertaken, the author recalls, a number of preliminary management decisions must be made, namely on what to protect, how far to standardise, and which tests to select. The same is true for the choice of habitat and species where tests are to be applied (p. 254). In spite of this, the author observes, the technical community is actually the one who takes most of these decisions. For Calow, the challenge, therefore, is to enable informed and useful input from all interested parties on either side of the technical divide, in accordance with the principles of permeability and transparency.
Based on examples taken from environmental risk assessment of chemicals in the Netherlands, the UK and the US, the last article of this volume, authored by Wilhem Halffman, centers its attention on the issue of trust, particularly on standardisation as a trust device. Standardisation of risk assessment methodology should be regarded as more than a merely technical affair, stresses Halffman. It also should be viewed as a means to establish trust among experts (p. 267). Here again, one is faced with a contrast between rhetoric and practice. Even though the standardisation of the environmental hazard of chemicals is generally presented as a technical affair, this does not imply that there are no expert judgments, which are not technical judgments, to be made.
Without wanting to diminish the solid technical reasons for regulatory scientists to standardise toxicity tests, Halffman’s paper argues that a sociological approach offers additional insights that could help to understand how standardisation works or does not work. Halffman emphasises that the process of establishing trust among experts has very similar traits to the process of establishing trust in experts, by those who are not members of the institutions of risk assessment (p. 267). This kind of comparison might be useful to understand sources of mistrust and contestation.
As this very brief and selective summary of contents indicates, consensus emerged among the contributors to Politics of Chemical Risk regarding the usefulness, for the regulatory process, of maintaining (or establishing) the separation between the risk assessment and the risk management functions. Most authors also agreed, however, that uncertainties in science, and the social and political basis of scientific assessments should be made more explicit and transparent than is often the case. Most papers also seemed to accept that the actual alternative is not between basing harmonisation efforts just on science, or understanding cultural differences and rationalities with the assistance of social scientists. It is rather in a compromise among the two kinds of action.
Drawing upon suggestions from the various papers, the editors attempt, at the end of the book, to map different scenarios for the future development of chemical regulation. Four possible scenarios are presented, in a reflexive and imaginative, though somewhat schematic manner, with particular reference to the EU (p. 310 ff.). In scenarios 1 and 2, regulation is centralised at the international or European level. In the first of these scenarios, regulation relies on a corpus of international experts belonging to a European Agency of Chemical Regulation . Under this scenario, the boundary between risk assessment and risk management is very marked. In scenario 2, labelled European risk consultation , a European Office of Chemical Assessment centralises the risk assessment process. The boundary between science and politics is looser. International political decisions are based on expertise in the context of an open process.
In the two remaining scenarios, by contrast, member states play the major role. In scenario 3, called European Coordination of Assessment , EU expertise is provided mainly by member states, the role of the EU being to harmonise standards in committees that represent national institutions. Expertise and the national context, therefore, intermingle. Scenario 3 is apparently closer to actual European regulatory practice. In scenario 4, Europe, through the European Office of Constructive Risk Assessment acts as a translator : differences in regulatory styles and in views on risk from different countries and interest groups are the starting point for European action. Various risk assessments are compared, and ultimately standardisation is lacking (p. 317).
The authors conclude that there are good reasons to maintain a division of labour between the domains of science and policy. To politicise every technical detail would, of course, increase conflictuality. Conversely, regulatory decision-making that is relegated to experts would lead to uncontrollable technocracies, as actual crises on BSE or transgenic products do confirm.
Regulators in the field of chemical risk, as well as in other fields of public regulation, in both national and international agencies, can find, in these propositions, valuable information for reflection and action aimed to improve the theory and practice of regulation.
Review of Howard E. McCurdy, Inside NASA, High Technology and Organisational Change in the U.S. Space Program, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1993.
When Pathfinder landed on Mars on the 4th of July 1997, and Sojourner was rolled out in front of the world’s eyes, NASA played the role it likes best: an organisation (leading space agency in the world) capable of cutting-edge technological achievements (robotic rover), of bringing people together (this time on the internet) through a miraculous performance of good (peaceful, elegant, intelligent) high technology. Pathfinder was the inaugeral mission of the Surveyor program, another mission of which, the Mars Surveyor Lander, is now on its way to Mars. Pathfinder also can be seen as the inaugeral ceremony of the new NASA. It was the first high-visibility project realized under the ‘faster, cheaper, better’ policy the current Chief Administrator, Dan Goldin, introduced in 1994. The mission was directed by a young crew, in intense collaboration with industry and with a low budget. (Pathfinder is said to have cost less than Jurassic Park.) It would be rash to take Pathfinder as exemplary of NASA’s current practice, but it showed NASA to be healthy and highly capable organisation.
The book under review testifies to the fact that only four years earlier it was far from evident that NASA could again become the centre of true excellence it had been at the time of the Moon missions. It traces the decline of NASA’s capability of accomplishing technologically difficult projects during the seventies and eighties. As the book’s title makes clear, the account of public affairs scholar Howard McCurdy is from the inside, and organisational change lies at the center of analysis. Starting from the culture put in place with the establishment of the space agency, McCurdy describes its blossoming during the first decade of spaceflight. The organisation s subsequent weakening is explained as the erosion of its original culture. The book is thus about the old NASA; it examines the rise and fall of NASA as it was in the beginning. Bureaucratisation is seen as the principal force of decline. Eventhough McCurdy doesn’t exclude the possibility of revival, he does consider bureaucratic take-over a structural tendency affecting high-performance organisations in the public sector.
Not only is it an unproblematic sociological insight that governmental institutions undergo bureaucratisation as they grow older, but from an STS point of view McCurdy’s frame of analysis is also fairly unusual. McCurdy namely opposes bureaucratisation to culture. Instead of describing bureaucratisation as part of the organisation’s overall cultural development, he sees it as going against culture. In his approach, norms and practices unify an organisation, excessive regulation and administrative growth takes it apart. Moreover, McCurdy takes strong culture as strengthening an organisation’s performance, a proposition he derives from neo-functionalist studies of corporate culture.[1] McCurdy thus works with a framework where the dominance of culture over bureaucracy explains success, and the overshadowing of culture by bureaucracy accounts for failure.
Even at first sight, this approach can be judged assymetrical, and possibly also romantic. It should be taken into account that McCurdy’s analysis is based on the opinions of NASA employees. It relies on interviews with NASA engineers, scientists and administrators and an additional survey, and was written as part of the program of the NASA History Office. While McCurdy takes care to meet requirements of statistical analysis and also crosschecks personal accounts with historical documents, he stresses that his observations reflect the views held by people associated to NASA. ‘This is the culture as they describe it’ (p. xiv). It provides an uncritical insider’s view of a technoscientific institute that perceives itself ideally as a centre of pure excellence, and prefers whenever possible to downplay its managerial and political affairs.
McCurdy begins with an overview of the organisations that were brought together in 1958 to form NASA. Most of them had been part of the military, but McCurdy doesn’t put a strong emphasis on this origin. Instead he focuses on the culture of ‘the engineer-scientist in charge’ and its constribution to early NASA culture. McCurdy observes a large continuity between the predecessor organisations and the new space agency. The research centres of NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), those of AMBA (Army Ballistic Missile Agency, lead by Werner von Braun and other German engineers) and the Naval Research Laboratories (which was in charge of the first [unsuccessful] satellite-program), received new names and new tasks when they became NASA, but their location and composition remained largely the same. McCurdy describes the centres as distant from Washingtonian politics, as adherents to ‘the triumph of technology and scientific inquiry for problem solving’ (p. 13) and as cultivating a meticulous work attitude. His account is very detailed, but because McCurdy brings these characteristics together under the heading of technical culture, his analysis remains one-sided. That the above properties can be explained, not only as deriving from the techno-scientific practice of the organisations, but also from their embeddedness in the U.S. military, is largely left out of the account. When McCurdy does refer to the military context in which the organisations operated, it is treated as simply an external condition for the development of technical culture. With regard to NACA, for example, McCurdy states: ‘Since much of NACA’s aeronautical work was done for the military, it acquired a powerful client that could shield it from the political cross-firing affecting other civilian agencies.’ He doesn’t go on to treat this situation as directly constituting organisational culture; instead he concludes by stating that it allowed ‘a technical rather than a bureaucratic culture’ (p. 28) to blossom.
McCurdy further elaborates on ‘the engineer-scientist in charge’ when discussing the working assumptions of NASA management (former NACA scientists and engineers, and administrators from Washington). The testing of prototypes and developed devices is described as playing a crucial role in the young agency: it served as a source of innovation and as the dominant criterion in assessing reliability and in decision-making in general. McCurdy attributes great importance to the last aspect: he values the culture of verification for its capacity to ward off tendencies of bureaucratisation, and to shield NASA from political interference. He thus observes a great distance between the techno-scientific authority that ruled NASA and conventional policy-making in the public sector as well as the political authority of government. While the fact that NASA management succeeded in implementing a policy where decisions were founded on technical and scientific standards is certainly significant, McCurdy falls short in his explanation of this success. He only accounts for it as deriving from the assumptions held in the predecessor organisations (NACA and AMBA). The question as to why an agency that is assigned the politically highly laden project of spaceflight, with a Washington official as its Chief Administrator, nevertheless managed to keep techno-scientific control over the decision process, is left unanswered.
By describing a substantial part of NASA’s original culture as deriving from the predecessor organisations, McCurdy to a certain degree evades the political and economic factors that influenced it. While he does present cultural elements that evolved in NASA in reaction to events in the political realm, McCurdy’s distinction between those that do and don’t pertain to the world outside, seems arbritary. The relation between NASA and industrial contributors to the space program, for example, is described entirely in terms of the NACA and AMBA cultures. According to McCurdy, the inherited emphasis on in-house technical capability assured NASA’s relative independence from commercial contractors, and allowed it to subject them to close supervision. But the high interdependence between NASA and industry (95% of NASA’s budget was spend on industrial contracts), as vividly described by journalist Norman Mailer in his A Fire on the Moon, is not considered constitutive of NASA culture. The cultural elements of tolerance towards risk and failure and frontier mentality, on the other hand, are discussed in a political context. McCurdy describes them as having evolved in response to the task President Kennedy formulated in 1961 (“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth”), and to the financial and public support NASA enjoyed as a consequence. NASA’s willingness to put men on top of modified intercontinental ballistic missiles is thus brought in relation to America’s involvement in the battle over technical supremacy with the U.S.S.R. But, as McCurdy also mentions, in reference to Tom Wolfe’s docu-drama about the early days of spaceflight, The Right Stuff, tolerance of risk and the drive to do what no man has done before played their part as well in the cutting-edge cultures of NACA and AMBA, with their test flights of experimental airplanes and rockets. In his analysis of NASA’s original culture, McCurdy doesn’t make sufficiently clear how it was marked by the national goals it was assigned to realize.
McCurdy’s account is susceptible to the critique that he mainly explains success by internal factors, not by external ones. But the other half of this criticism does not fully apply. McCurdy doesn’t switch to an external explanation in order to account for failure, but largely remains inside NASA. He considers budget cuts, fading public support and bureaucratisation of government as a whole only partly responsible for the decline, and locates the epicenter of change in NASA’s inability to negotiate with government and the preponderance of management over technical culture within NASA. On the basis of statistics of the size and age of the work force, internal promotions and the ratio of administrative to scientific and technical employees, McCurdy shows that the weakening of NASA began in 1967. This moment of turnabout is also recognized in other studies of U.S. science and technology policy. McCurdy describes it as the point at which political considerations took over from techno-scientific ones. This rather naive separation of the political and the techno-scientific again approaches an all too familiar asymmetry, but McCurdy does conceptualize the conflict between the two as an internal dynamic. He lays bare the grounds on which a previously technocratically run centre of excellence experiences the mixing of techno-science and politics as an unhappy marriage. He gives a detailed account of how the slow-down of the decision-making process, inconsiderate interference of managerial considerations in design affairs and incessant project presentations made it impossible to direct programs as efficiently as before. Describing the overspending, delays and technical problems that infested the Space Shuttle, space station Skylab and the Hubble Space Telescope, McCurdy makes clear how ‘NASA became the Post Office gone to space’, as one employee expressed it. (It’s a comment I’ve also heard being made about the European Space Agency, in a bar at ESTEC, ESA’s research centre near the picturesque coastal town Noordwijk, the Netherlands. There an employee said that ESA has always resembled a space-faring Post Office).
While McCurdy’s discussion of bureaucratisation is revealing, his analysis of the sources and consequences of the process is slightly dissapointing. The latter are almost exclusively described as the erosion of NASA’s original culture. The elements that McCurdy put in place in the first part of the book, are taken up one by one to report on their decline: instead of letting test results decide, managerial factors became decisive; instead of keeping up the technical capability inside NASA, the agency increasingly came to rely on industry; instead of acknowledging risk, people closed their eyes to it; instead of looking for projects that no man had undertaken before, employees grew conservative. This account is extremely homogeneous. Besides the Space Shuttle Program, which he describes as an partially failed attempt at the routinisation of space flight, McCurdy pays little attention to the other types of space missions that NASA continued to develop after the ending of Project Apollo in 1972. The unmanned planetery probes, for example, that NASA launched during the seventies and eighties, are only mentioned very briefly. While these missions [2] didn’t produce the shock effect of the manned missions to our nearest celestial body, and didn’t come near to the sense of victory and heroism attached to the first moonlanding (the culmination point of the space race), they seem to point at a change of the space agency, more subtle and open-ended than the simple loss of original culture. With regard to the sources of change, McCurdy’s mainly attributes it to organisational aging, a concept he derives from studies of government. It suggests that organisations go through a life-cycle, moving from a period of expansion, characterized by a growing work force and high flexibility, to a period of contraction, where budgets decline and maintaining the organisation becomes the main challenge. Apart from the question what status can be ascribed to this movement (is it natural?), the concept of aging remains silent on the different role NASA came to play within the govermental realm at large. McCurdy states that govermental agencies have to compete with other agencies for funding. But he doesn’t draw the conclusion that it is important how NASA formulates the relevance of going to space.
At this point one wonders whether McCurdy rates the situation to which NASA attempted to adapt itself at its own value, or whether he judges it by standards that fit past but not present circumstances. Generally speaking, the integration of spaceflight in the socio-economical landscape has been a major occupation of space agencies from the seventies onwards. As part of this undertaking, NASA tightened its relationship with the private sector and scientific institutions. The agency increasingly relied on contracts with industry, offered itself as a service provider to military and commercial satellite owners, and collaborated with Earth and climate sciences. While McCurdy recognizes that NASA had to adapt to the loss of its monopoly on astronautical expertise, he mainly interprets NASA’s partnerships as signs of the sapping of its superiority and independence. While he doesn’t explicitly refer to the fact that the Challenger disaster of 1986 has been attributed to an engineering mistake made by an industrial partner, he exclusively describes increased subcontracting as compromising innovation and reliability. He fails to see in NASA’s bonding with industry a new way of making itself socio-economically indispensable. The fact that the high-technology industry developed itself into an equal partner of government (as Chris Hables Gray, a student of Haraway, points out in his study of the U.S. military, Postmodern War, The New Politics of Conflict, Routledge, 1997) is presented as doing no good but only wrong to NASA.
McCurdy’s account shows a strong bias towards NASA’s early years. Especially in his conclusion, it becomes apparent that his view of the development of the older NASA as one of unambiguous decline partly results from his preoccupation with the original NASA. Here McCurdy stresses that the run-up to the moonlanding was a crash program: it demanded a huge innovative effort, and goverment was willing to provide the funding for it. He states that the blossoming of innovative cultures is dependent on circumstances like these. This raises the question whether McCurdy’s narrative of downward movement is not the outcome of his narrow definition of innovative culture. One could argue that in the fields of Earth observation, communication and unmanned planetary probes, NASA did make headway in the decades that followed Apollo. It is just that these successes were of another kind than those of the space race era. The projects had less public visibility, lower budgets, and were developed in negotiation with industry and scientific institutes. One might even ask if it isn’t the case that NASA’s big problems occured precisely in the projects it approached as if still working under a crash program regime. McCurdy doesn’t ask these questions; he takes the crash program as the ideal situation for space exploration. He also doesn’t take into consideration that the crash program paradigm is one of one-time victory and short-term success, bringing forth the assumption that some steps and a little cruising around in a rover equals ‘doing’ the moon. It makes a Mars walk seem the only satisfying next step, the only next frontier worthy of that name. It is a typical insider perspective on NASA’s future, which McCurdy takes over uncritically. While McCurdy’s lack of distance made him an attentive observer in previous passages, it here results in a narrow view of what may count as progress.
The central role attributed to the young NASA is also problematic in another way. McCurdy claims that the NASA experience, as he calls it, is generalisable to high-performance agencies in the public sector. Since most of these agencies, with the exception of the military sector, didn’t start out as crash programs, the generalization is questionable.
NOTES
T. Peters and R. Waterman, In Search of Excellence, Harper and Row, 1982, and H. Kilmann, M. Saxton and R. Serpa, Gaining Control of the Corporate Culture, Jossey-Brass, San Francisco, 1985, among others. The former traces the business success of Walt Disney and IBM back to the distinctive cultures of these companies. Success is approached as dependent on the incorporation of certain key-tenets (hands-on orientation, bias for action etc.) in a company’s internal culture. In the latter the histories of AT&T and Chrysler Corporation are equally described in terms of the development of corporate culture.
An example of a NASA unmanned planetary probe of the seventies is Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, which became the first to reach an outer planet in 1973 and the first to leave the solar system in 1983. Viking 1, the first to make a soft landing on Mars in 1976, is another.