“commensuration – the process of measuring according to a common standard, or bringing things into relationship for quantification or proportional comparison”
A great deal has been said about the personnel cost from long shifts in infrastructure control rooms interspersed between tedium and emergency. Such burnout is often credited to the extraordinary demands, cognitive and behavioral, placed on their centralized control rooms because of their high reliability mandate to provide safe and continuous services even during emergencies and worse. Operators there are expected to be everyday heroes. Matters look different, however, when the starting point is the commensuration that comes with markets for infrastructure services. Here the causal analysis of high personnel costs shifts to the violence that comes with simplification and quantification (famously: “getting the prices right”).
Commensuration is core to the market transactions. Energy markets produce prices, prices have price-takers, and in this case the price-takers are denominated as energy suppliers and consumers, singly and in aggregate. The control room fulfills its high reliability mandate by putting limits to commensuration in real time operations. This is because of widespread societal dread over systemwide failure of society’s critical infrastructures. People die when the grid fails. When failure threatens, the control room ceases to treat its energy users as aggregated suppliers and consumers. The “end-users” are instead people to be saved, whose collectivity is vastly more differentiated along many dimensions than solely or equally economic.
Market software exists in the transmission grid infrastructures to establish and operate on the basis of real-time energy prices. Centralized control rooms there turn out to be an unique organization formation to balance competing demands under pressures of real-time load and generation. This means preventing the physical and operational collapse of the infrastructure while undertaking these market transactions. (There have been notable cases where market designs and transactions have physically endangered the underlying infrastructure for those markets.)
Several features following from control room efforts to contain and limit a fully commensurated provision of real-time energy. Widespread societal dread of systemwide failure translates into what control room operators call “nightmares that keep us awake at night.” These are what-if crisis scenarios are of greater granularity than, say, the crisis narratives that energy users, for example, may have over climate change impacts on interconnected infrastructure operations. But because of grid and task environment complexities, what-if scenarios of infrastructure operators are NOT predictions of what will happen, but only of could—thus the scenarios’ “nightmare” status.
Under the deregulation initiatives of the late-last century, the introduction of energy markets into infrastructure provision became very intense, and with it, the position of real-time control operators managing under high reliability mandates. The control rooms we have studied then and since then continue to do a great deal of boundary work in ensuring an autonomy or semi-autonomous position because of the real-time urgency in having to make hour-by-hour decisions for an entire, complex system.
Two important practices in seeking/establishing this autonomy deserve mention. An important part of the boundary work is the control’s unique (but not guaranteed!) capability of achieving team situational awareness in times of emergency (where “keeping the bubble” can be thought of as a kind of mutuality-in-autonomy). Second, the importance of improvisational behavior when push comes to shove. A great deal of creativity in assembling options for the next step ahead can be observed in situations where formal protocols and procedures do not apply or have yet to be rendered. In this way, the cognitive and behavioral demands on operators are more differentiated and variegated than many outsider analysts suppose.
NB. This blog has been provoked by the terms, insights and framework of N. Buitron, F. Mühlfried, and H. Steinmüller (2026). “Nightmare egalitarianism: Commensuration, autonomy, and imagination.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70062).
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 