Rebels and Pioneers: Technocratic Ideologies and Social Identities in the French Nuclear Workplace, 1955-69

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 483-530

  Hecht, Gabrielle ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84992897620     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631296026003001     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Political Designs: Nuclear Reactors and National Policy in Postwar France’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 35, No. 4 (October 1994), 657–85.
2. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
3. See, for example, Colleen Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)
4. Eda Kranakis, ‘Social Determinants of Engineering Practice’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 19, No. 1 (February, 1989), 5–70.
5. Historians have devoted considerable energy to examining how, mediated through traditions and communities and transformed by language and discourse, ideologies articulated at the national level come to acquire meanings for workers and their lives: see Lenard R. Berlanstein (ed.), Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993) for an analysis of recent debates on this topic in French labour history. The role of workplace technologies and practices in these historical processes has, however, been treated as ‘materialist’ rather than ‘cultural’, and has therefore received little attention in these analyses.
6. The literature on French technocracy is quite extensive. A good sampling of this scholarship is: Kranakis, Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis note 3
7. John Hubbel Weiss, The Making of Technological Man: The Social Origins of French Engineering Education (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982)
8. Terry Shinn, Savoir scientifique et pouvoir sociale: VEcole Poly technique, 1794–1914 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nation-ale des Sciences Politiques, 1980)
9. Jacques-A. Kosciusko-Morizet, La ‘Mafia’ Polytechnicienne (Paris: Seuil, 1973)
10. Robert Gilpin, France in the Age of the Scientific State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968)
11. Frank R. Baumgartner and David Wilsford, Trance: Science within the State’, in E. Solingen (ed.), Scientists and the State: Domestic Structures and the International Context (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 63–91
12. Theodore M. Porter, ‘Objectivity and Authority: How French Engineers Reduced Public Utility to Numbers’, Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1991), 245–66
13. Cecil O. Smith, ‘The Longest Run: Public Engineers and Planning in France’, American Historical Review, Vol. 95 (June 1990), 657–92
14. Robert Frost, Alternating Currents: Nationalized Power in France, 1946–1970 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). While some of these authors examine the social politics and composition of technocratic elites, most do not differentiate between various kinds of technocratic ideologies. The exception is Robert Frost, who argues that EDF was ‘cast in a left technocorporatist mold’ (53) and who examines the consequences of this for the place of workers and labour unions in the utility's managerial structure. He does not, however, examine the implications of a leftist technocracy for work practices.
15. The basic premise of this scholarship is that in a world filled with mortal dangers, people do not base their choice of which ones to worry about on some absolute, decontextualized sense of safety or danger: rather, they are influenced by cultural factors. Much of this work has taken a structural approach. Steve Rayner, for example, has examined how employees in American hospitals behave in the presence of radiation hazards, and found that people respond to risk according to how much autonomy, power and trust they have in their jobs. He develops a matrix model to try to predict whether individuals will tolerate, deny, take or avert risks according to their position in the institutional structure of a hospital: see S. Rayner, ‘Management of Radiation Hazards In Hospitals: Plural Rationalities in a Single Institution’, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 16, No. 4 (November 1996), 573–91.
16. This approach builds on the work of Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, who analyze American society in terms of three forms of social organization — hierarchy, market and sects — and argue that people's place in this scheme explains their behaviour in the face of danger: see their Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982). While I draw on some of the basic premises of such scholarship, my analysis also demonstrates the limits of this kind of structural approach. Describing an institutional structure and using that structure as an explanation for behaviour is not enough. If, instead of taking the organization of social relations (and, more specifically in this case, the organization of work) for granted, we examine its provenance, then we begin to see how broader social and political ideologies shape the cultural meanings of work and risk in particular settings and at particular historical moments. The cultural construction of risk in the workplace must be understood in the larger context of the cultural construction of that workplace.
17. An excellent example of this kind of study is Gary Downey, ‘Risk in Culture: The American Conflict Over Nuclear Power’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 1 (1986), 388–412.
18. See, among others, George Mazuzan and Samuel Walker, Controlling the Atom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984)
19. Samuel Walker, Containing the Atom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).
20. Robert Frost elegantly explains this consensus, calling it a ‘modernist coalition’ and noting that, at least in the case of an EDF dam project, the coalition consisted of ‘engineers imbued with a culture of high technology, technocratic socialists seeking a means to circumvent the logic of the capitalist market, Communists attempting to establish a permanent foothold on the nationalist political landscape, and modernist bourgeois searching for a more efficient capitalism’: see R. Frost, ‘The Flood of “Progress”: Technocrats and Peasants at Tignes (Savoy), 1946–1952’, French Historical Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 1985), 117–40, at 128.
21. For more on labour unrest in the postwar period, see Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991)
22. Darryl Holter, The Battle for Coal: Miners and the Politics of Nationalization in France, 1940–1950 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992)
23. Jean-François Picard, Alain Beltran and Martine Bungener, Histoires de VEDF (Paris: Dunod, 1985)
24. Georges Lamiral, Chronique de trente années d'équipement nucléaire ă Electricité de France (Paris: Association pour Phistoire de l'é1éctricité en France, 1988). In his thorough analysis of worker-management relations at EDF, Frost shows that the utility did not live up to its social potential: by 1968, it had a ‘symbiotic relationship with [the capitalist economy]’ (246). But the utility retained its symbolic importance as an icon of improved worker-management relations, and work culture within the utility remained solidly left-wing.
25. Ordonnance No. 45–2563 du 18 octobre 1945, Journal Offtciel (31 octobre 1945), quoted in Lawrence Scheinman, Atomic Energy Policy in France Under the Fourth Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 8.
26. For more on the early years of the CEA, see Spencer Weart, Scientists in Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
27. Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Constructing Competitiveness: The Politics of Engineering Work in the French Nuclear Program, 1955–1969’, in William Aspray (ed.), Technological Competitiveness: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on the Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Industries (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 326–51.
28. Maurice Pascal (1956), quoted in Georges Lamiral, Chronique de trente années d'équipement nucléaire ă Electricité de France (Paris: Association pour l'histoire de l'électricité en France, 1988), 9
29. Bertrand Goldschmidt, Pionniers de l'Atome (Paris: Stock, 1987).
30. A. Ertaud and A. Pagès, ‘Le contrôle des réacteurs G2 et G3’, Bulletin d'Informations Scientifiques et Techniques du CEA (henceforth BIST), No. 20 (1958), 126–39. [Note: this journal only gives authors' initials — and sometimes just their surnames.]
31. M. Lignières, J. Bobigeat and A. Darré, ‘Installations électro-mécaniques’, BIST, No. 20 (1958), 141–55.
32. A. Ertaud & G. Derome, ‘Chargement et déchargement’, BIST, No. 20 (1958), 69–88, at 86.
33. J. Rodier, ‘Evolution de la protection dans le Centre de Marcoule’, BIST, Nos 72–73 (1963), 5–10; interviews (see note 29).
34. The main accomplishment of the SPR agents during G2's start-up phase was to provide breathing equipment to men who worked in an environment where carbon dioxide leakage might occur. Carbon dioxide gas presented two potential dangers. First, if present in sufficient quantities, it could asphyxiate or poison anyone who inhaled too great a quantity. Second, even a minute amount of renegade carbon dioxide would contain radioactive particles: if inhaled, it would cause internal radioactive contamination which presented even more danger to humans than external skin exposure. The metal and concrete ‘shields’ provided by reactor designers did not, in the opinion of SPR agents, adequately protect workers against this and other risks of internal contamination. See J. Chassany, ’La radioprotection des piles Gl, G2, G3’, BIST, Nos 72–73 (1963), 11–17.
35. Experimenting with various fabrics led SPR agents to conclude that all outfits should be made out of cotton, which could be decontaminated more easily than other materials. An agent leaving a regulated zone would scan his body with a radiation detector. If the detector recorded dosages above the accepted norms, he would undergo decontamination and discard his clothes into the designated bin, from which they would travel to the SPR's new laundry facility. See J. Rodier, H. Bouzigues and Bouttot, ‘Les problèmes vestimentaires posés par l'exploitation des installation actives et leurs solutions’, énergie nucléaire, vol.4, no. 1 (janvier/février 1962)
36. France had adopted international radiation exposure standards set by the early 1960s. For people directly engaged in work involving exposure to radiation, this meant that their overall organism could not be exposed to more than 5 (N-18) rems per year, where N was the age of the workers (legally, no one under 18 could work in a radioactive workplace). In addition, such people should not be exposed to more than 3 rems in any 13-week period, and women should never be exposed to more than 1.3 rems. External exposure to radiation varied for different parts of the body: the limits for the skin and bones were 30 rems/year, for most organs, 15 rems/ year, and for the hands, forearms, feet and ankles, 60 rems/year. See R. Vial, ‘Protection des travailleurs dans l'industrie nucléaire’, énergie nucléaire, vol.6, no.5 (jullet/août 1964), 305–12.
37. J. Rodier, J. Castain and C. Guerin, ‘Information et éducation en matière de radioprotection’, BIST, Nos 72–73 (1963), my translation.
38. Anthropologist Françoise Zonabend analyzes the differing meanings of exposure and contamination and cleanliness and uncleanness in La presqu'île au nucléaire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1989), her study of present-day work in France's plutonium reprocessing plant in La Hague.
39. Chinon's organizational structure paralleled that of EDF's thermal power plants. Jobs at the site fell into three main divisions; here I concentrate primarily on the production division (the Service Exploitation). This organization was first put into effect at the thermal plant at Nantes-Cheviré. Whereas before, there were as many services as there were technological sub-units in the plant — machine rooms, boiler rooms, and so on — this new method greatly centralized the organization, dividing the personnel into three main ‘functional’ categories, and each placed under the authority of a single engineer. See R. Fays and J. Pupponi, ‘La conduite des centrales nucléaires de Chinon’, énergie nucléaire vol. 5, no. 8 (décembre 1963), 562–72.
40. P. Beau, A. Douillard and J.J. Martin, ‘La radioprotection des travailleurs dans les centrales nucléaires d'Electricité” de France à la lumière de huit années d'exploitation’, énergie nucléaire, vol. 13, no. 5 (septembre/octobre 1971), 350–59.
41. in the early 1970s, after EDF stopped building gas-graphite reactors and began building pressurized water reactors licensed from Westinghouse, work and risk practices in reactor sites began to change. Labour unions, especially the CFDT, began to protest against certain aspects of working conditions. See CFDT, L'électronucléaire (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
42. For a sophisticated discussion of relationships between technological knowledge and social hierarchies, see Nina Lerman, From ‘Useful Knowledge’ to ‘Habits of Industry’: Gender, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Technical Education (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1993).