A conference hosted by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) is now underway with the purpose of bringing together business leaders and risk executives from industry to talk about ways to plan for a pandemic flu outbreak. We at ARC have had little in the way of concerted discussion about preparedness in the private sector — at least, I’ve not been aware of much chatter about it on our end.
As good second-order observers, we have probably noted that interesting distinctions have been made regarding “where” preparedness occurs. This emergent assemblage finds its most concrete form in the activities and practices located, at least in a certain sense, in the domains of public health, emergency management, and increasingly, homeland security. It is interesting that this assemblage works with and reifies distinctions between all this, and the private sector. In the American context, it seems that there exists a kind of rehashing of familiar debates about what “the state” can do, and what can and must be left to the private sector — as well as, for that matter, non-profits (have a look here for a recent report on Bay Area non-profits and disaster non-readiness). Hurricane Katrina, as we recall, produced the now-familiar mantra that “we [i.e., the state] can’t do everything” — which a truism, but an interesting one. Still we might ask, strictly as a matter of critical inquiry: why not?
Anyway, this is a ramble, but it’s headed, I think, towards the following question: Where are the fault lines between public and private in the context of preparedness and vital systems? Is this distinction valid, empirically? I think conceptual work in this area is crucial.
I think this is excellent and important. One area in which we have thought about this relates to the various quasi-official governing bodies in certain sectors that tend to be the ones that produce preparedness guidelines. So there is NERC in electricity, there is a similar board for water utilities, one for chemical, etc. The interface between public and private sectors through these boards is linked to a history that Andy and I began to trace out in the distributed preparedness paper, so some conceptual orientations might be found there. But I agree that we need more contemporary work on this.
I have talked to some people working for companies that focus on consulting other companies on how they should prepare for pandemic influenza. Quite frankly, I have stopped doing more inquiry on this because I was bored very soon. It might seem trivial, but these consultants are seeing pandemic influenza primarily as a business opportunity and they spend their time fiying around the country, eating lunch, and consulting companies telling them where their “needs” are and creating opportunities for their own work. As Luhmann says, organizations are looking for problems to which they can offer a solution. There you go.
When I asked consultants what they themselves would do in case of an influenza pandemic, it turned out that they had never thought about this (as subjects and as organizations)… Ironically, the least prepared companies are those who consult others on how to prepare. If you’re looking for the existential you’re searching at the wrong spot.
I would be careful with categories like “public” and “private”. My suggestion would rather be to look how they are deployed. I think they are first-order observation categories. Obviously they are highly charged, and so people start to invent around them. I think this is the place where some interesting insights might be found.
Well, it might be a matter of where you look. It is not plausible to argue that no private companies are doing preparedness or risk mitigation. There is a huge world of this out there, with a diversity of techniques. It might be a question of where one looks — or what questions one asks. For example, I imagine that if one were to take a serious look at the financial services industry, one would find the intensive introduction of various forms of preparedness after 9.11.
On public and private: yes and no. Yes, of course, the categories are being constantly reconstructed around specific organizational forms. But that is precisely the object of inquiry here. So when the government decides, for example, that serious measures have to be taken to increase electric system reliability, they might turn to NERC. So it is a semi-public, in the sense that it is undertaking something that has been defined as crucial to a “public” aim of governing (as opposed to the private interests of the utilities involved). But the organizational structure is “private” in the sense that there is no mechanism through which government institutions can actually compel action; or, at least, that has been the American organizational pattern. If one is interested in preparedness in the United States, I don’t see how one can skirt these issues.
I didn’t claim that no companies are interested in preparedness. On the contrary. I have actually looked into the financial servies industry and they are doing a lot (for several reasons). I do have a good informant in the financial services industry, but I have not found it particularly interesting. The problem is, I guess, that I’m not interested in preparedness per se. My primary interest is not describing what kinds of things are going on out there. There is obviously a lot going on! But I’m not a positivist historian trying to describe everything that is related to preparedness and pandemic influenza. So yes, i agree it definitely is a matter of where one looks. But in my inquiry, some places have turned out to be more interesting than others. And this is, of course, also a matter of one’s analytic interests. Hence yes, I agree, it depends on the questions one wants to ask.
As to public/private, I agree. But my sense is also that experts are increasingly trying to avoid these terms because they make their work more difficult. More inquiry is necessary, and I plan to write a paper on this in the next few weeks.