Managing and regulating aquaculture is a complicated issue. From the perspective of fish farmers as well as regulators managing aquaculture can be regarded as what political scientists refer to as a "wicked problem." This is because there is a great extent of uncertainty and lack of firm knowledge with respect to the externalities of aquaculture production; e.g., diseases, environmental impacts, and conflicts with other user interests. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the aquaculture sector contributes to the uncertainty as new solutions emerge, rendering established knowledge obsolete or irrelevant. Designing appropriate public regulations and policy measures is thus important, but difficult. Based on empirical data from Norway, we investigate what respondents from public agencies and the industry perceive to be challenges in governing aquaculture and what we may infer on the characteristics of a good governance approach. We propose that such an approach needs to focus on building competence, collaboration, and be adaptable. Furthermore, it needs to be flexible and cost efficient.

In this paper we explore the proposal that knowledge generated by safety scientists may displace or marginalize existing local or system-specific safety knowledge embedded in operational practices. The proposition is based on theory about relationships between knowledge and power, complemented by organizational theory on standardization and accountability. We suggest that the increased reliance on self-regulation and international standards in safety management may be drivers for a shift in the distribution of power regarding safety, changing the conception of what is valid and useful knowledge. Case studies from two Norwegian transport sectors, the railway and the maritime sectors, are used to illustrate the proposition. In both sectors we observe discourses based on generic approaches to safety management and an accompanying disempowerment of the practitioners and their perspectives. We discuss some contributing elements to this development: for example, the roles of external and internal HSE-specialists and the increased importance of international standards. We propose that the search for broad generalizations and the widespread adoption of cybernetic thinking in safety science may resonate with societal trends towards standardization and bureaucratic control. We conclude that safety scientists, safety professionals, and organizations that hire safety professionals need to be sensitive to the possibility that their well-intentioned efforts to promote safety may lead to a marginalization of local and system-specific safety knowledge.

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New public management has led to major institutional changes in the sectors operating critical infrastructures. The previously integrated utility companies have been dismantled and are now run, regulated and organized more like private entities. This paper proposes two concepts that may aid the analysis of these organizational changes and the consequences they may have on societal safety. Commoditization refers to the process where work is sought transformed into atomistic standardized products to be ordered on a market. Modularization refers to the creation of discrete entities coordinated by market mechanisms and standardized interfaces. We argue that commoditization of work and modularization of organizational entities pose challenges to some of the informal characteristics of high-reliability organization's, with recognized importance especially for crisis management. This is illustrated by examples from Norwegian electricity network operators.

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Today a key feature of every technological organization is the abundance and pivotal role of standardized data sets. This paper discusses the interplay between standardized semantic knowledge representations and situated work on a knowledge intensive workplace. Drawing upon anthropological fieldwork with geologists and engineers in the 'subsurface' department of an oil company, this paper discusses how an oil reservoir is represented with standardized semantic entities, and how such representations are used when workers try to make sense of the reservoir. The terms decontextualization and recontextualization are used to address and highlight the work that is involved in transporting meaning out of and into different contexts. Examples are given on how the subsurface personnel try to make sense of the oil reservoir through data: creatively using data to explore, speculate and guess about the subsurface. Through these examples, the paper explores the integrated relationship between the minds trying to understand the reservoir and the symbolic tools they have available, outlining some of the experience-based embodied skills that are involved in this work. It is argued that a key skill in this workplace is handling the translations between the standardized and singular.

In this paper we address the institutional context of the police response during the 22 July terror attacks in Norway. Our analysis shows how institutionalized informal practices, established over time, influenced the police response during the attacks. The response presented challenges in terms of management of actor complexity (the number of actors involved and the need for coordination) and uncertainty. The importance of these dimensions is discussed based on the police's response during the terror attack in Oslo in 2011. Our analysis of the course of events shows that the resources dedicated to strategic management were marginalized during the event and that insufficient attention was directed towards intelligence and investigation. This contributed to an ineffective police effort to track and capture the perpetrator and prevent or respond to the secondary attack. This is similar to what is often found in hindsight investigations of crises. The aim of this paper is to contextualize and analyze these findings in light of the institutional context of the Norwegian police. Reports from exercises before and after the terror attack indicate that the marginalization of strategic work, intelligence and investigation has been and remains a persistent problem in the Norwegian police. Interviews indicate that there are informal aspects of the police organization regarding status and established conventions of what "proper police work" is about that explain how the observed inadequacies are deeply embedded in the organization.As such, the paper is not a study of a failure in crisis management, but rather the institutional patterns of action that make actions and decisions stand out as meaningful for the actors involved in dealing with situations of high complexity and uncertainty.

Based on a study of reliability consequences of New Public Management (NPM) reforms in Norwegian critical infrastructure sectors, this article suggests that the discourse of work found in NPM renders essential aspects of operational work invisible -including practices that are known to be of importance for reliability. We identify two such organizationally 'invisible' characteristics of operational work: the ongoing situational coordination required for keeping a water supply system or an electricity grid running, and the aggregating operational history within which this happens. In the reorganized infrastructure sectors, these crucial aspects of operational work fit poorly in market oriented organizational models and control mechanisms. More generally, our analysis contributes to the understanding of how some types of work fit poorly within the discourse of work found in NPM.