“commensuration – the process of measuring according to a common standard, or bringing things into relationship for quantification or proportional comparison”
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.)
The control rooms we have studied 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 seeking to do so 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. Ingenuity 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.
So what? The cognitive and behavioral demands on operators and the worlds in which they work are more differentiated and variegated than supposed by outsider-analysts who assume a fully commensurable or commensurated system.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 