Habits Over Routines: Remarks on Control Room Practices and Control Room Studies

The evolution of computer tools has had profound impacts on many aspects of control rooms and control room studies. In this paper, we discuss some key assumptions underpinning these studies based on a new case of the electricity distribution control rooms, where the reliability of the electricity infrastructure is managed by a combination of planning and real-time maintenance. Some of these practices have changed remarkably little over the past decades – partially because they have been considered to have been ‘digitalized’ since the 1950s and have continued to amass digital solutions from different periods. Hence, the gradual transformation of control room work demands nuanced attention, both conceptual and empirical. To outline a framework for this work, we provide a conceptualization of organizational routines, habits, and reflectivity and synthesize existing CSCW and control room literature. We then present an empirical study that demonstrates our concepts and shows how they can be applied to study cooperative work. By addressing these aims the paper complements, and advances, the important topics recognized in this special theme issue and hence develops new research openings in CSCW. We address the necessity to avoid implicit determinism when analyzing new digital support tools and suggest focusing on how working habits mediate social changes, distribution, and decentralization in representing the power distribution in control rooms.