Daresbury SERC Laboratory

In 1990 I spent an ethnographic year watching the work of managers, scientists and engineers at Daresbury SERC Laboratory. This was a major, largely publicly funded, scientific facility near Warrington in Cheshire with more than 600 employees.100At the time it ran several research facilities (the largest was a synchrotron radiation source) which were available, usually on a grant-awarded basis, to visiting scientists from British and overseas universities and, increas- ingly, to large science-based companies such as ICI. Users would come and set up experiments which made use of experimental ‘beam time’ at one or other of the many experimental stations.

During the year of my study I watched researchers conducting experiments, sat with the technicians responsible for running the facilities on a day-to-day basis, and interviewed a wide range of staff. I also attended most of the major management meetings. I will return to the ethnography itself below, but first I want to discuss the process by which managers built a project planning system. In one paper about this I recreated an ethnographic present about a particular incident to do with project planning in the following terms:

Andrew is sitting at his desk. He’s about to call an emergency meeting of the management board. He’s bothered because the ‘second Wiggler project,’ the so-called ‘flagship project’ for the laboratory, is starting to fall seriously behind schedule. But what is there to see of this second Wiggler project? Does it look as if it is behind schedule? The answer is, no it doesn’t. Not really. Not in any way that you or I could see. For as he sits fretting in his office, it is nothing more than a hole in the ground, and a bunch of construction workers pouring concrete. There’s no particular sign that anything is wrong. It’s a mess alright, but only a mess in the way that all construction sites are a mess: hard hats, hard shoes and mud everywhere.

(Law 2002b, 27)

Andrew is the name I gave to the then head of the laboratory. And what interested me about the story was the way in which Andrew was able to see something that the rest of us could not: here a very serious but otherwise invisible delay to this important ‘second Wiggler project’ – a project with a budget of several million pounds that was vital to the future of research based on synchrotron radiation research, and indeed to the laboratory itself.

So how did he achieve this apparent ability to see the invisible? The answer is that he enjoyed the benefits of a spreadsheet. This arrayed figures that

represented the amount of effort going into the project, which in turn allowed him to make a quick comparison between the actual effort and the amount of effort that was supposed to be going into the project. And the particular morning which I report above had revealed a worrying truth. This was that according to the project plan eighteen man-years of effort (such was the laboratory vernacular) should have been devoted to the project at this point in its lifetime, but in reality only eleven man-years had actually been put into it. Though this wasn’t visible to the casual observer, the discrepancy told him that the project was developing at only two-thirds of the intended rate. Indeed it revealed that all the contingency time built into the original project plan had already been used up. In short, it was months behind schedule, and this fact was likely to become dramatically visible eighteen months or two years on, when the second Wiggler was supposed to be completed and ready for users.

So how did Andrew know all this? I have mentioned the spreadsheet. As is obvious, a spreadsheet is a device for arraying, juxtaposing, relating, creating, and (at least very often) simplifying numbers. If Andrew lay at the heart of a method assemblage, then the spreadsheet was producing a set of statements or inscriptions that (were said to) correspond to a reality. But, as is also obvious, the spreadsheet was simply a small part of a larger inscription device, a set of mediating practices crafting not only a set of figures but a manifest reality, a hinterland out-there. So what of that absent hinterland?

A part of this involved what the laboratory called the ‘manpower booking system’. The basic idea was simple. Each employee was supposed to fill in a form every month to describe how he or she had spent his or her working time. The form was a compromise between precision and robustness. Thus the grid of possibilities available to employees was relatively coarse: time was broken into half-day units, rather than quarter days or hours, and the employees were given only a few codes to enter in those half-day slots. These codes mainly referred to a series of projects (the second Wiggler was one) plus a few residual categories, including general laboratory administration and management.

Some employees resented the need to fill in these newly invented forms and invented spurious uses of their time or refused to file them altogether. However, most filled them in, albeit with a fair amount of grumbling. Life, they pointed out, does not naturally fall into half-day segments. Many mornings are fragmented. Some tasks are relevant to more than one project. And what about all the unclassifiable bits and pieces that seem to take up so much time in a working day? Nevertheless, in the end most employees returned their completed forms through their project leaders to the accounting department where they were checked for glaring anomalies. Then the laundered results were entered into a spreadsheet. And this was the point at which they became arithmetically tractable in relation to projects and project effort, the moment when senior managers such as Andrew could draw out and explore manpower figures.

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