Situation awareness: An actor network theory perspective

Maintaining a high level of Situation Awareness (SA) is considered one of the most essential elements for safe and effective flight operations. In a study of accidents among major air carriers, 88% of those involving human error could be attributed to problems associated with situation awareness, similarly problems with SA were found to be the leading casual factor in a review of military aviation mishaps (Endsley, 1999). Given the problems and consequences associated with human error in aviation, current strategies to address SA often focus on aircraft systems design and training programs in order to improve the efficacy and safety of flight operations. In complex domains such as aviation, situation awareness is inherently distributed over multiple people and groups and over human and machine agents. Sociology offers an interesting approach to looking at the socio-technical elements of systems through the application of Actor Network Theory (ANT). "By advocating a seamless web composed of actors, the Actor Network approach dissolves the dichotomous relationship between humans and machines and society and technology into a non-anthropocentric framework" (Sommerville 1997). It facilitates the perspective that looks at the inter-connectedness of the heterogeneous elements characterized by the technological and non-technological (human, social, organizational) elements. "Complex systems cannot be understood by studying parts in isolation. The very essence of the system lies in the interaction between parts and the overall behaviour that emerges from the interactions" (Ottino,2003). This paper introduces ANT as an approach to examining situation awareness in aviation and proposes the perspective that situation awareness is a systemic attribute, a construct resident within a network of heterogeneous elements.