An assemblage of framings and tamings : multi-sited analysis of infrastructures as a methodology

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjce20 Journal of Cultural Economy ISSN: 1753-0350 (Print) 1753-0369 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjce20 An assemblage of framings and tamings: multisited analysis of infrastructures as a methodology Antti Silvast & Mikko J. Virtanen To cite this article: Antti Silvast & Mikko J. Virtanen (2019) An assemblage of framings and tamings: multi-sited analysis of infrastructures as a methodology, Journal of Cultural Economy, 12:6, 461-477, DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2019.1646156 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2019.1646156 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 09 Sep 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 452 View related articles View Crossmark data An assemblage of framings and tamings: multi-sited analysis of infrastructures as a methodology Antti Silvast a,b and Mikko J. Virtanen c a Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway; b Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK; c Faculty of Social Sciences (SOC, Sociology), Tampere University, Tampere, Finland ABSTRACT The social life of methods –the idea that research methods are an important topic of inquiry in and of themselves –has been receiving increasing interest in scholarship on the organisation of the economy and social life, including Science and Technology Studies (STS). In STS, especially ethnographic methods have been important for decades. This article develops an ethnographic methodology for the study of a very new case that challenges the assumptions underpinning many STS ethnographies. This case is the networked energy infrastructure, and we specifically focus on its risk management and markets. Drawing upon recent STS interest in multi-sited ethnography, the article’s research design is termed the multi-sited analysis of infrastructures (MSAI), and it develops the concepts of framing and taming to focus on meaning formation as mundane sense-making and as technicalised reasoning on different sites. We demonstrate these concepts in a multi-sited ethnography of energy infrastructure and its risk management and market activities in public regulation, special control rooms (including energy trading), and households. The article rounds up by explaining how the application of our methodology contributes to the advancement of interests in multisited ethnography, relating our research to the previous work in the fields of STS, infrastructure studies, and their methods. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 20 June 2018 Accepted 14 July 2019 KEYWORDS Multi-sited ethnography; Science and technology studies; electricity; infrastructure; risk; methodology Introduction In Science and Technology Studies (STS), ethnographic methods such as fieldwork and participant observation have been central since the first generation of laboratory studies and the rise of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge in the 1980s (Hess 2001, Hine 2007). STS scholars have made several advancements with ethnography, a methodology of data collection for observing how actors produce scientific and technological knowledge in normally restricted settings, usually in their own environments and contexts (Beaulieu 2010, Parmiggiani and Monteiro 2016). Doing ethnography aligns with the aims of the classic Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (see Hess 2001)–to study the production of scientific evidence and consistency subject to negotiations, local decision-making, and interpretation by expert actors. If we accept that social research methods have a ‘social life’–that they are not mere techniques but open up certain social worlds and hence partly bring them about (Law and Ruppert 2013, Savage 2013)–then these STS assumptions should receive increasing scrutiny considering how they shape views about science and technology. © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. CONTACT Antti Silvast [email protected] Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU. NO-7491, Trondheim, Norway JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 2019, VOL. 12, NO. 6, 461–477 https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2019.1646156 In this article, we develop an ethnographic methodology for the study of a very new case that challenges the assumptions underpinning many STS ethnographies. This case is the networked electricity infrastructure, and we specifically focus on its risk management and markets in special control rooms, energy-using households, and public regulation models that govern energy distribution risks. Our contribution joins recent scholarly discussions that have produced new considerations of ethnography as an STS methodology. Inspired by what anthropologist George Marcus (1995) calls multi-sited ethnography, STS researchers have begun to expand their field studies –going further than one laboratory or other single sites of expert knowledge and instead conducting research on multiple field sites. At a time when localities are transgressed by transnational discourses, techniques of governance, financial markets, and communication networks, multi-sitedness implies developing careful analyses of the very connectedness between distinct ethnographic field sites (Marcus 1995, Ong and Collier 2005, Rabinow et al. 2008, Collier 2011). As a methodological strategy, multi-sitedness means adding generality to specificfindings from such distinct sites. This is very important even in fieldwork in ‘small places,’such as one village, which can reveal multiple external interconnections and layers (Candea 2013). Multi-sited approaches bring together existing research knowledge, organisational contexts, and historical timeframes with ethnographic sensitivity to situated and local activities, hence considerably expanding local ethnographies (Pollock and Williams 2009,2010, Hyysalo et al. 2018). Sociologist Christine Hine (2007) summarises multi-sited ethnography as a ‘middlerange methodology’in STS: its research techniques are suitable for in-depth engagement with data from distinct sites, but also apt for reaching beyond their particularity and developing more generic concepts and theories from those premises. This article advances concrete research suggestions, strategies, and recipes for multi-sited methodologies in an area where these perspectives are of clear relevance –namely energy infrastructures. From Thomas P. Hughes’s(1983) Large Technological Systems and infrastructure studies (Edwards 2003,2010), the urban geography of liberalised and privatised infrastructures (Graham and Marvin 2001), and Multi-Level Perspectives on sustainability transitions (Verbong and Geels 2007, Köhler et al. 2017), research in this field has established that infrastructural technologies like electricity, telecommunications, heating, and transportation integrate many parts of society and adjust to them (Jalas et al. 2016). The layers relevant to infrastructures range from international markets to legislations and regulations, supply companies, scientific research programmes, and practices of everyday infrastructure use (Van der Vleuten 2004, Mitchell 2008). For example, electricity networks enable professional lives, the experience of modernity, human needs, modern habits, and even state power through national electricity grids that make electricity available constantly and ubiquitously (Boyer 2015, Abram et al. 2019). Sustainable energy transition provides a timely example of these insights: studies show us that political cultures, economic trends, industry actors, technologies, institutions, rules, regulations, and many other parts of energy infrastructures have to change and reinforce one another for a successful transition to a more sustainable model of energy provision (Verbong and Geels 2007, Silvast et al. 2013). In sum, recent research has recognised the multiplicity of energy transitions and their processual character and raised methodological questions about moving ‘beyond the single case and the isolated research object’(Köhler et al. 2017, p. 46). However, multi-sited approaches are rarely addressed as advancements that could accomplish this goal (cf. Boyer 2015, Abram et al. 2019). Indeed, until a few years ago, energy policy research and social research on energy was, for the most part, single-sited: it was research from a particular standpoint, in one nation-state or subnational region, or concerning only a particular energy technology (see the overview in Sovacool 2014). There is a distinct sense that this area still prizes single-sited studies for their rigour, such as when assessing comparative case studies against single case studies and arguing that ‘(s)ingle case studies tend to be evidence-rich, allowing a range of relevant factors to be measured and assessed’(Sovacool et al. 2018, p. 30). Related to this, STS and its associated fields have experienced an entirely ‘localist turn’(Pollock et al. 2016, Hyysalo et al. 2018)–meaning an increasing amount of research that focuses on detailed 462 A. SILVAST AND M. J. VIRTANEN organisational practices, assuming the local practices are unique to that particular organisation. Studies focusing on one site are adept at capturing the first-hand experiences of technology design and use. Furthermore, and significantly, the dependence of research and researchers on project funding has a structuring impact that may support these kinds of snapshot case studies rather than longterm multi-sited ethnographic work. Overall, while STS theory anticipates that energy is a multi-sited socio-technical infrastructure, we contend that multi-sited methodologies have not reached their full potential in this area. Our article aims to provide a toolkit for addressing this issue. To attain its aim, the article carries out four tasks. Firstly, it explores and discusses concepts that explain the notion of an ethnographic site and the necessity for multi-sited research with a focus on infrastructure studies. In so doing, it draws upon established theories from STS and other related fields including sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. Secondly, we operationalise these theories to a set of guiding questions and tools for empirical research. Our research design is termed the multi-sited analysis of infrastructures (MSAI) and develops two main conceptual tools to grasp different aspects of meaning-formation: the concept of framing focuses on mundane, rarely reflected upon forms of sense-making on different sites, while the concept of taming guides us to examine cognitive, rationalised, and technicalised forms of framing. Both concepts –and framing in particular –are also concepts in the social study of markets, and we connect them to that research tradition. Thirdly, we demonstrate the use of these conceptual tools through a multi-sited ethnography of the electric power infrastructure and its risk management and market activities on three field sites: at the public regulatory scale, in special electricity control rooms, and in households. Fourthly and lastly, the article concludes by explaining how the application of our methodology contributes to the advancement of STS interest in multi-sited ethnography. This part develops more discussion on the relation of our methods to the previous work in this field –especially to the emerging Biography of Artifacts and Practices (BOAP) approach (Pollock and Williams 2009,2010, Hyysalo et al. 2018) and the tools of classic infrastructure studies including ‘infrastructural inversion’ (Bowker and Star 1999) and ‘boundary objects’(Star and Griesemer 1989). As the complete infrastructure cannot be mapped exhaustively, we suggest that a multi-sited ethnography of it advances a middle-ground between in-depth engagement on distinct sites and more generic concepts and theories reaching beyond their particularity. Conceptual positioning The inherently complex nature of infrastructures yields myriad angles of approach, as is well known in STS (e.g. Star 1999, Edwards 2003,2010, Van der Vleuten 2004, Karasti et al. 2016, Parmiggiani and Monteiro 2016). For example, Paul N. Edwards (2003) situates infrastructure into three ‘levels’: the level of individuals and small groups; the level of institutions, such as corporations and standardsetting bodies; and the level of political economies and governments. These divisions offer a heuristic for understanding the social organisation of infrastructure –the ways in which infrastructure exists at the same time in every household, large organisation, and regulatory body. Observations of complex and interconnected technologies such as infrastructures demand these kinds of methodological guidelines to control the level of complexity in the analysis. Guidelines are necessary to appreciate the scale and level –or the ‘granularity’–of the observation. We cannot keep an eye on a whole electricity infrastructure, for example, which simultaneously encompasses everything from local technical components and national transmission networks to international electricity markets. However, the methodological strategy of reducing the observation to one point only goes against the inherently complex nature of the infrastructure. Hence, we develop and introduce a rigorous methodology for examining infrastructures such as electricity networks that both reduces and gives leeway for the complexity of their composition in a controlled manner. We conceptualise the research design of what we term the multi-sited analysis of infrastructures (MSAI) to achieve this goal. JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 463 The use of a multi-sited approach to rethink the interrelations of space and place has been a topic in both the cultural sciences and STS (see Hine 2007), especially since Marcus’s1995 review of the emergent methodological trend in anthropology at that time –namely multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995,1998). Globalised flows of information, cultural products, money, migration, and technoscience mean that societal and cultural phenomena cannot be isolated to a single location and observed by focusing on one site alone (Rapp 1999, Ong and Collier 2005, Collier 2011). Appadurai (1996) speaks of ‘scapes’as spheres of life made up of or articulated by diverse globalised flows. Different, potentially global scapes –such as the financescape, which consists of flows of money – connect different locations and people (cf. Sassen 1991)ordifferent sites, and produce different, increasingly global risks in so doing (Centeno and Cohen 2010, Centeno et al. 2015). Among the recently developed multi-sited methodologies in STS, the Biography of Artifacts and Practices (BOAP) (Pollock and Williams 2009,2010, Hyysalo et al. 2018) stresses very similar points. It starts from the importance of historical context and focuses on the relationships that it takes on from technology studies –between users, designers, and the various intermediaries in between them. One strategy in multi-sited ethnography is to follow the ‘artefact’around while considering its appropriation by different technological actors over time. However, multi-sited ethnographies may also seek to follow people, metaphors, certain stories, plots, allegories, conflicts, or the lives of people (Marcus 1995)–or to follow the continuous formation of infrastructures across sites, as we will do here. The vantage point of multi-sitedness opens up the inherent crosscutting characteristics of the phenomena under scrutiny. Starting from multiple sites leads to a methodological focus on connections and nexuses, and on processes of translations between sites. With these issues in view, we examine the composition of an infrastructure not as a single phenomenon or object but as a folded assemblage of diverse practices, both enacting the infrastructure and attuning to it. Hence, our MSAI methodology focuses on intermediations across sites on different scales. It guides us to look at both the multiplicity and the coherence of a diverse infrastructures such as electricity supply. It also guides inquiries into both the objects and their making. Infrastructure is constantly made, but at the same time, it is –as a resistant and lively socio-material assemblage –part of this making process. The infrastructure is enacted on multiple sites in specific multiple practices. However, these various practices of infrastructure enactment are simultaneously attuned to the infrastructure as a coherent and robust entity. Methodology: framing and taming We develop the tandem concepts of framing and taming as tools for our MSAI research design. These concepts help us to analyse different aspects of the construction of and attunement to infrastructures, and to keep our focus on the processual and frictional nature of the formation of infrastructures on different sites. Framing, a concept made famous by the sociologist Erving Goffman (1974), is the more general of the two, as it refers to all the mundane ways by which individuals understand and make sense of situations at hand. According to Goffman, these definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organisation which govern events –at least social ones –and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. (Goffman 1974, pp. 10–11) Consequently, framings are the basic elements of meaning-formation that mediate the subjective and the objective. On the one hand, people use framings to understand what it is that is going on in a situation, but, on the other hand, the framings they use are neither completely arbitrary nor voluntaristic. We utilise the concept of framing to focus on mundane and often unreflected upon processes of sense-making on different sites. Infrastructures are constantly made sense of in habitual, everyday routines. For example, the electricity network is particularly meaningful for making daily practices 464 A. SILVAST AND M. J. VIRTANEN possible. This framing, which is constantly formed during the practice of everyday life, leaves the complexity of the infrastructure behind and the various possibilities electricity provides mostly blackboxed, so long as it functions adequately (Shove 2017). In cultural economy and STS literature, framing is also used in a more particular sense, as a technical simplification: it is a reduction of complexity from a technical angle, for instance by making things commensurable with the market models of economics (Callon 1998). This happens, for example, when infrastructural concerns are addressed by the introduction of new markets, as two cultural economy scholars note: ‘agents must be equipped to become calculative, and goods must be stabilised and framed in order to make exchange possible’(Pallesen and Jacobsen 2018, p. 2). For the past years, energy consumers have received attention as these kinds of ‘calculative agents’: they are expected to switch their power suppliers, closely follow energy prices, make rational decisions, and hence strengthen the power markets both nationally and transnationally (European Commission 2019). This has become pronounced in building the EU’s internal market for electricity and ‘smart’energy systems, which are expected to support active consumers that ‘take their own decisions on how to produce, store, sell, or share their own energy’; using devices such as smart energy metres that allow consumers to be ‘informed about their energy consumption and costs in real time’(European Commission 2019, p. 12, see Silvast et al. 2018). Paying attention to these kinds of framings reveals two insights. The first is that framings may be performative: the active, material, social, and technical configuration of elements as being economic not only describes a market, but can also bring markets about, at least temporarily (e.g. McFall 2010, see Silvast 2017a for an overview). The second important point is that this effect is not linear and does not need to happen predictably. Framings are precarious achievements that can fail when the frames become fragile, incomplete, or contested, as has happened with the framing of renewable energies as economic commodities via market support mechanisms in several energy markets (Cointe 2015, Pallesen 2016). These conceptualisations contain elements of the second part of our conceptual tandem, taming. The origins of the concept of taming can be traced back to Ian Hacking’s historical-philosophical oeuvre. In Hacking’s(1975,1990) work, the erosion of determinism from the seventeenth century onwards ushered in techniques to control indeterminism. Chance had to be tamed, and Hacking’s historical work stresses the advent of probabilistic statistical models and approximate laws in this regard. We adopt Hacking’s idea of taming as an active process of complexity reduction by means of technologies and techniques or –to use another of Hacking’s concept –styles of reasoning. Tamings are cognitive, rationalised, and technicalised forms of framing. In methodological terms, the concept of taming leads us to focus on active and conscious, organised, and technicalised processes that aim at taming the complexities at hand. In our research context, the active taming of complexities of infrastructures involves various material tools, such as software and communications devices; checklists and protocols; and styles of reasoning, such as cost–benefit calculations. We merge Hacking’s idea of the taming of chance with Goffman’s mundane frames to calibrate the MSAI as a conceptual tool. Framing and taming are not mutually exclusive categories but analytical tools to highlight different aspects of ongoing infrastructure-making on different sites. Framings and tamings can, for example, alternate sequentially in the specialised electricity control rooms that we examine in this article. Experts frame the infrastructure –and, at the same time, their own work – routinely and mainly unreflectively as long as this framing is not challenged by anomalous occurrences. An alarm, for instance, leads to more cognitive taming work and the need to adjust existing framings actively. One can find similar cycles at work in households when routinely utilised infrastructures, such as electricity, cease functioning –the disruption of everyday life creates doubt about existing habitual framings and makes one form new habits as fast as possible (Silvast 2017b). 1 An inherent critical potential also resides in the research design of the MSAI. The construction of and attunement to infrastructures is not necessarily a unitary and frictionless process without power relations. As we examine infrastructures consisting of diverse framings and tamings on different field sites, potential asymmetries surface between the sites vis-à-vis framings and tamings. Daily life is JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 465 highly dependent on electricity, for example. As electricity users, we are not only connected to the electricity infrastructure in material ways, but also by the framings and tamings carried out outside the scope of our own framings. By using electricity, we are shaped as electricity customers, preferably rational, price-conscious ones. Electricity infrastructure conveys not only electricity, but also the technical taming work of electricity as money-mediated and cost-efficient. To sum up, by utilising the MSAI equipped with the frame/tame tandem: We, firstly, approach infrastructures from a multi-sited point of view. Multi-sited research design enables us to observe how infrastructures are enacted and attuned to on different field sites. Secondly, we utilise the conceptual tandem of framing and taming to grasp both mundane and unreflected framings as well as cognitive-technical tamings in these enactments of and attunements to infrastructures on different sites. Thirdly, we focus on the overlaps and connections as well as translations and frictions of different framings and tamings both on one field site as well as on and between different sites. Fourthly, we target subtle power relations in these processes and address the performative aspect of the distribution of framings and tamings across sites. In the following, we illustrate our research design in a multi-sited ethnography of the electric power infrastructure and its risk management and market activities. Multiple sites in the electricity infrastructure The empirical basis of this article consists of ethnographic fieldwork carried out by the first author in Finland between 2004 and 2008. We draw upon the semi-structured interviews with electricity experts and lay people in addition to participant observation and a selection of key policy documents in this area from the time. Twelve interviews and 20 hours of participant observation were conducted in two electricity control rooms of a Finnish city –one for coordinating the local electricity grid, the other for trading electricity on the Nordic common stock exchange. 2 In addition, nine householders were interviewed semi-structurally, and over 100 households returned a short survey. 3 More than 50 key policy documents were gathered during this fieldwork, out of which the article uses a selection that focuses on the public regulation of energy distribution risks (see broader overview in Silvast 2013). Public electricity regulation: what does reliability cost? Without large-scale energy storage, electricity has to be generated whenever demand occurs. If electricity demand exceeds supply or the distribution of electricity encounters a fault, the shortfall can be usually met by reserves or energy trading. These procedures increase costs to the providers, however, which then passes them on to consumer prices. Government policies, in turn, often focus on electricity prices, including restricting their changes or even capping consumer prices. This dynamic is important when considering what kind of a ‘commodity’electricity is. Electricity does not have a‘pure’economic market, but the free trade of energy is allowed in a policy framework. Typically, these frameworks are enacted by energy market regulators –quasi-legislative bodies that monitor the operation of electricity utilities and assign various kinds of targets to them (Silvast 2017a,2017b). Energy provisions are actively tamed by the regulations in terms of ‘fairness.’These tamings, for their part, have impacts across the sites of the electricity infrastructure. Many European countries’electricity regulation shared the same starting point until about 2000. Regulators started to tame the provisions by assigning price caps to the electricity network service charge that is billed to customers (CEER 2005, p. 31). Soon, however, the regulators noted that while taming one risk (overpricing), this mechanism created another. When prices are capped, electricity network companies might reduce their maintenance and investments to make a profit. According to an established framing by economists (see Gramlich 1994), a lack of investments in 466 A. SILVAST AND M. J. VIRTANEN turn directly influences the quality of infrastructure provision: ‘Price-cap regulation without any quality standards or incentive/penalty regimes for quality may provide unintended and misleading incentives to reduce quality levels’(CEER 2005, p. 31). The next generation of electricity regulation models, which have become increasingly popular in Europe since around 2005, strive to monitor this electricity supply quality and motivate its improvements (CEER 2005, pp. 31–32). In practice, statistics on quality are made public; ‘incentive’and ‘penalty’schemes are enforced upon utilities to control their profits in terms of their quality of supply; and there is a growing number of arrangements that fix maximum limits for electricity interruptions –i.e. blackouts –and customer compensation for cases when the limits are exceeded. Along with compensation, however, a related matter has been making customers aware of the costs of quality. Thus, specific emphasis has been placed on electricity customers’‘expectations’and ‘their willingness to pay’for good-quality electricity (CEER 2011, p. 4). As the organisation Council of European Energy Regulators summarised it: ‘Results from cost-estimation studies on customer costs due to electricity interruptions are of key importance in order to be able to set proper incentives for continuity of supply’(CEER 2010, p. 9). As can be seen, these market regulations are attempting to tame electricity infrastructure and its risks on multiple scales. Energy regulations provide ways of understanding how companies providing electricity should act –via having ‘proper incentives’–in their everyday work. They also concern the rationalities of lay people and the ways they can be turned into rational agents that constantly estimate the costs of having a continuous power supply in their workplaces or homes. At the same time, these models do not encapsulate the concrete taming work for the diverse power infrastructure. As a senior manager in an electricity company remarked in the study, we know how energy quality regulation and its optimisation is supposed to work, but not so much about how regulation enforces specific maintenance arrangements and the preparedness arrangements that are in place especially to optimise the regulation model (Silvast 2017b). Recent scholarship has drawn attention to this need for active maintenance work on infrastructures. Stability, continuity, and economic efficiency, in addition to preventing breakdowns and responding to disruptions, have to be maintained every hour of the day in provisions such as current infrastructures (Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2016, Anderson and Gordon 2017). Workers in specialised electricity control rooms (Roe and Schulman 2008,2018, Silvast 2018) are responsible for this continuity and the quality of electricity distribution, as well as for purchasing and generating electricity to be distributed according to various local demands. The infrastructure being framed as coherent across sites depends on the connections that these control rooms make between electricity generation, power markets, distribution networks, and the households’energy uses. The control room then reveals significant parts of how the infrastructure is constantly tamed to function coherently and robustly. Managing electricity supply, markets, and risk in two control rooms This research site was situated in an electricity company in a Finnish city. Before the 1990s, a single electricity utility covered the entire supply chain to the city, ranging from energy generation in power plants to electricity distribution, customer sales and billing, and the maintenance of the electricity network. Following energy market liberalisation, a process that started in many Western countries in the 1990s (Graham and Marvin 2001) and now includes all EU Member States, the electricity infrastructure is no longer organised in this way. Electricity generation and electricity distribution are different functions in a liberalised infrastructure; these infrastructures have been ‘unbundled’ so that market competition is permitted in generation, but distribution remains a local monopoly. As a result, their ongoing control and management has also been divided into two units –i.e. two control rooms. One control room is responsible for managing and trading the generated electricity and matching it with demand in real time, and the other control room is responsible for maintaining the actual distribution of the electricity in a continuous and reliable manner to the consumers via the local electricity grid. JOURNAL OF CULTURAL ECONOMY 467 The two control rooms in the field study were both part of a company supplying electricity. The staffworking in each room had clearly defined roles and functions. The patterns and rhythms of their work had differences, but also similarities (Silvast 2018). Following the terminology employed in the company, we use electricity network room to refer to the control room responsible for the electricity grid, and energy market centre to refer to the room in which people operated in various energy markets. The two control rooms were next to each other, separated only by a wall. According to the principle of unbundling, however, the operators were not supposed to ‘know’about each other’s activities. In practice, they could have easily talked to each other through an open door or in the kitchen that they shared. Both in terms of the formal organisation and the working habits, the two control rooms, their work, and the risks that they dealt with differed in terms of their temporality, rhythms, used metrics, and responses. The duty of the energy market centre was to participate in the Nordic common energy market, Nord Pool, whose headquarters is in Oslo, Norway and which links energy market players in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Germany. The pool, as the electricity industry in Finland characterised it, ‘is a kind of a stock exchange that gathers daily the sale offers from electricity providers for each half an hour and determines the system’s market price’(SENER 2000, p. 10). The seven brokers in the control room, who work in shifts throughout the day, were responsible for making these transactions happen for the city’s energy supply. In practice, they balanced energy levels in two electricity markets. Firstly, they used the Elspot market to manage the supply and demand of the day ahead. A second energy market that has gained more importance over the years is called Elbas. Rather than concerning the day ahead like Elspot, Elbas is a real-time, hour-ahead marketplace that has operated in Finland and Sweden since 1999, Germany since 2006, Denmark since 2007, and Norway since 2009. Elspot orders were placed on the energy stock exchange once per day, at 13:00 Finnish time (12:00 Norwegian time due to the time difference). One of the workers explained the day-ahead Elspot bid and offer process as follows: On the morning shift, we make the next day’s prognosis, where the power plant’s generation power is defined based on the weather situation, and from there the electricity needed. From there on, we also send the order to Norway (to the energy stock exchange), which has for each hour the information on the price at which we are willing to sell and buy (energy). At 13:00 each day, the company then sends its ‘order’–the price at which it is willing to sell and buy energy during each hour of the following day –to the Nord Pool stock exchange. However, much skill is required, and the necessity to place the order at a specific time was instituted by the energy markets. Another relevant temporality of the work was shaped by the real-time market, Elbas. All the operators in our study emphasised the ever-changing contexts of day-to-day practice, and the real-time market certainly seemed to raise this intensity. Even when little is happening, the worker’s main task is to stay alert. One of the workers summed up energy trading as watching a campfire: ‘You have to be constantly maintaining a small flame. That is, you mustn’t fall behind the energy stock exchanges.’Here, again, the expert work is framed vis-à-vis the energy market; actors manage electricity and its always-on, reliable provision in a specific compressed timeframe of the market. However, when interviewed, the informants made it clear that their work is not merely about following markets on computer monitors and interacting with them according to hourly and daily rhythms. The work critically required special skills and capabilities. Both ordering energy for the day ahead and adjusting it hour-by-hour provided useful examples. The ordering, for its part, is shaped by the difficulties of predicting the weather, which directly affects energy usage in the combined power and district heating that the company provided. This requires active taming work, usually in the form of finding a ‘comparison day’that had had a similar temperature and consumption pattern as the day ahead. For this, the same days of the week were preferred: weekdays tend to have a slightly different energy consumption than days on the weekend. However, only 468 A. SILVAST AND M. J. VIRTANEN interviews concerned the anticipation of electricity supply failures and the management of their damage as risks. The questions were divided into sub-themes about working practices, energy markets, and security in the control rooms. The control room operators worked for one electricity company in Finland and were males in their fifties or sixties, with the exception of one younger female worker. 3. The questions for the households concerned electricity supply risks in the home. The household interviewees were found through various means, including through a housing association and ‘snowballing’new respondents from those subjects that had already replied. Both female (7) and male (2) respondents from the greater Helsinki region were included in the household interviews. The household survey (115 respondents, response rate 21%) was posted to the customers of two electricity companies in Finland, one for a city and the other for a rural region. The structure of the survey included four sections: the household impacts of electricity supply interruptions, preparedness against them, lessons from them, and attitudes. The survey responses covered all adult age groups, and both men and women were represented –however, the majority was male, more than half were over 60, and most lived in an electrically heated detached house. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Funding This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, National Centre for Energy Systems Integration [grant number EP/P001173/1]; NTNU Energy Transition Initiative; and Academy of Finland INSPRINS [grant number 283447] and TreWISE projects [grant number 312624]. Notes on contributors Antti Silvast works as a Researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Mikko J. Virtanen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tampere University and a Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. 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