Planning, Control, and Adaptation:: A Case Study

Vincent Gauthereau and Erik Hollnagel

European Management Journal, 2005, vol. 23, issue 1, 118-131

Abstract: This article relates the findings of an ethnographically informed study conducted at a Swedish Nuclear Power Plant. It describes a set of events while the plant was shut down for a short non-productive outage. In order to understand better how high-reliability organizations successfully manage the conflict between bureaucratic planning and flexibility we provide a description of simultaneous levels of control that dissolve the conflict. Instead of merely describing actions as planned, or improvised, the present work illustrates that no clear-cut distinctions can be drawn between what is improvisation and what is not. Understanding planning as a control activity as well, enables us to grasp the different values of the canonical activity of planning.

Keywords: Planning; Improvisation; Nuclear; power; generation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
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