Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth

Masters of Uncertainty

Masters of Uncertainty

Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth

Phaedra Daipha

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

PHAEDRA DAIPHA is assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29854-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29868-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29871-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298719.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Daipha, Phaedra, author.

Masters of uncertainty : weather forecasters and the quest for ground truth / Phaedra Daipha.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-29854-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29868-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29871-9 (ebook) 1. Weather forecasting—United States. 2. Weather forecasting—Decision making. 3. United States. National Weather Service. I. Title.

QC983.D26 2015

551.63—dc23

2015005398

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my parents, who first and always nourished my quest for ground truth

Contents

Introduction: Decision Making under Uncertainty

1 The Weather Prediction Enterprise

2 Working the Weather: A Shift in the Life of a Weather Forecaster

3 Distilling Complexity: Atmospheric Indeterminacy and the Culture of Disciplined Improvisation

4 Managing Risk: The Trials and Tribulations of Hazardous Weather Forecasting

5 Anticipating the Future: Temporal Regimes of Meteorological Decision Making

6 Whose Weather Is It Anyway? From the Production to the Consumption of Decisions

7 Toward a Sociology of Decision Making

Acknowledgments

Notes

References Cited

Index

Introduction

Decision Making under Uncertainty

Oh, what a blamed uncertain thing

This pesky weather is;

It blew and snew and then it thew,

And now, by jing, it’s friz!

Philander Chase Johnson

Just another ordinary day at the National Weather Service, it seems. The two forecasters on shift are quietly fussing with their computers, deftly summoning animated weather maps in and out of existence as they click away at their screens. Just as they did the day before, and the day before that. Yet this is only my third time here and I cannot be sure of what I am observing. To make matters worse, I got caught in the thunderstorm on my way in and missed the 7:30 a.m. shift briefing. I tell Doug, the forecaster I am shadowing today, that I forgot to check the forecast last night, and he manages a smirk at the irony. But then he says, It wouldn’t have made much of a difference, actually. We, too, were caught a bit by surprise. Apparently, as late as last evening, the computer models showed no significant potential for precipitation. The following set of model runs early this morning, however, told a very different story. Doug has updated the forecast to reflect an 80 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms lasting through the midafternoon, diminishing to about 30 percent as the weather system exits the region. He is already working on the forecast of the next 36 hours but keeps darting glances at the radar loop and current weather observations pulsating on his left screen. Not that he would be able to stay focused on the forecasting task at hand, even if he wanted to. The surprise June thunderstorm, during a weekend, no less, has brought with it a barrage of phone calls from people concerned about their outdoor plans. Doug is on the phone with a woman who called about the forecast for the town twelve miles to the east. He pulls up the satellite imagery on his middle screen and then swivels his chair around to look out the window: Well, things should be clearing up right about now, but there’s still a 35 to 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms for our area. The woman must have asked for clarification because he goes on: It’s not going to be a washout, but there might be a few showers through the evening hours. At this point, as I learn later, the woman explains that her daughter is getting married at 5:00 p.m. and is it going to be raining then. Doug swivels back to his left screen to check the radar imagery once more: Like I said, Ma’am, there’s a chance of showers and thunderstorms this evening, although the radar doesn’t show anything. So, conditions are a little unstable, but if you want a yes or no answer, I’d say no. The woman presses on. Doug, his voice rising a bit: Ma’am. I cannot give you any guarantees. What I can give you is a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms with a possibility of dense fog locally.

* * *

Weather forecasting is arguably the most iconic example of a decision-making task riddled with deep uncertainty—uncertainty that cannot be reduced to calculable risk. This irreducible uncertainty derives from the inherently chaotic nature of the atmosphere, popularly captured in the notion of the butterfly effect. But it is further exacerbated by the relative sparseness of weather data, the imperfections of meteorological measurements, the dependency of numerical weather prediction models on unreliable initialization conditions, the competing needs of disparate forecast users. Hence the probabilistic language in which weather predictions are typically couched and that we conventionally like to attribute to forecasters hedging their bets. And hence the no less iconic jokes about these weather forecasting experts—for their perceived evasiveness and blunders in judgment but also for their hubris in claiming to be able to predict Mother Nature in the first place.

Contrary to popular wisdom, however, weather forecasters are not faring worse at mastering uncertainty than stockbrokers, physicians, professional poker players, or any other group of so-called expert decision makers. As a matter of fact, they are faring considerably better. They may not be, strictly speaking, masters of uncertainty—after all, by definition, no one can master deep uncertainty—but they certainly are masters at mastering uncertainty. Per the judgment and decision-making literature, weather forecasters exhibit an exceptionally high degree of reliability in their assessment of uncertainty and risk.¹ All the usual jokes notwithstanding, weather forecasts are continuously getting better. Not simply because computing power and numerical weather prediction models are getting better but because weather forecasters themselves are also getting better at assessing how good they are. What allows for such an effective calibration of their performance is the fact that, precisely because they are trying to predict the weather, they find themselves in the enviable position of being able to evaluate their decisions regularly and in near-real-time against ground truth information.

This rather uncommon property makes the weather forecasting task an exceptionally good case for theorizing the process of decision making. Following forecasters in their quest for the certainty of ground truth promises to hold the key, as it were, to unlocking the analytically elusive process of diagnosis and prognosis as it actually happens. And that, in a nutshell, is my objective in this book. By systematically excavating how weather forecasters achieve coherence in the face of uncertainty, how they harness diverse information to project themselves into the future, I endeavor to develop a conceptual framework for studying uncertainty management in action. I endeavor, in other words, to develop a sociology of decision making.

Theorizing Decision Making in Action

Our decision-making process is bounded by inescapable cognitive and informational constraints. Most of us, most of the time, make every effort to act rationally, carefully weighing all available options to arrive at the best, most optimal decision. The more we strive to act rationally, however, the more it becomes apparent that we do not actually have all the possibly relevant information about the task at hand, that there is not enough time and resources to obtain all the possibly relevant information, that there are just too many possible future scenarios to consider even when there is enough time and resources. Indeed, the persistence of the pleonasm most optimal in common parlance serves as a testament to the fact that the quest after the optimal decision proves to be a chimera, impossible in practice. To further complicate matters, the process of decision making is often permeated with ambiguity: preferences are unclear or unstable, objectives shift, options come and go, preexisting solutions are strategically matched with problems rather than the other way around.

In practice, then, our decisions are not driven purely by choice. And they are not, and cannot be, perfectly rational. Letting go of the false notion that decision making is based on rational choice, however, does not require jettisoning rationality altogether, nor does it require resigning oneself to the idea that decision making is a fundamentally haphazard process. But it does require eschewing normative criteria in favor of context-dependent explanations of judgment in action. Once one acknowledges that decision making cannot aspire to some gold standard of optimality, then surely decisions are to be considered on their own terms, within the context of their production, and not according to some a priori definitions of rationality.

Back at the drawing board, any foray into the process of real-world decision making must begin by charting the contours of expertise in action. Given that, despite their best efforts, decision makers typically operate under varying levels of uncertainty due to cognitive and informational constraints, what does making a skillful if imperfect decision look like on the ground? A good place to start this conceptual charting expedition is with the paragon of skillful decision making itself: laboratory science. Indeed, the most celebrated contribution of science and technology studies, or STS as commonly known, has been precisely to crack open the black box of laboratory science and theorize the decision-making process inside. A long line of ethnographies of laboratory life demonstrate that, similar to the realities of production in ordinary workplaces, producing scientific knowledge is a messy, improvisational, and highly practical activity.² Rather than adhering to abstract laws and systematic rules of method, scientists creatively adapt resources at hand to solve problems as they arise. By reconceptualizing the process of scientific knowledge production as craftwork and scientists as pragmatic entrepreneurs aiming for success rather than truth, STS scholars opened the door for the reconceptualization of expert decision making more broadly. Expertise is now seen as predicated on shared, embodied skills and know-how arising in situated conditions of use. Becoming an expert presupposes socialization and apprenticeship into the meaningful conventions and techniques of the community of experts one wishes to join—the acquisition of a discipline, in effect. But to be recognized as an expert is a never-ending process requiring relational work and a continuous makeshift readjustment of one’s knowledge claims relative to those of other experts. Expertise must be enacted and performed to be socially salient, to exist in practice.

This is how I employ the term expertise in this book. If one is to eschew normative criteria of human rationality in search for empirically grounded accounts of judgment in action, then one must remain equally wary of efforts to derive a normative theory of expertise (cf. Collins and Evans 2006). And so, while I note the various skills and competences that are marshalled in the ever-present quest to master uncertainty, I regard expertise as a relational achievement, provisionally negotiated among humans, machines, and nature within a particular sociotechnical context of practice. By extension, my empirical focus on expert decision making is not meant to highlight an ideal or an exemplar but simply to take advantage of the fact that the process of decision making is as a rule considerably more externalized, hence considerably more observable, in settings where experts are at work.

Charted out of what we already know about expertise in action, my approach to studying decision making in action is guided by the following core assumptions. (1) Decision making takes place within a more or less institutionalized field of action that, over time, affords its members a certain stock of knowledge. (2) This stock of knowledge consists of cognitive heuristics and decision-making techniques that help initially frame and specify the empirical context of action. (3) Decision-making action may not be rational, but rarely is it routinized or unreflective—instead, it is habitual and eminently practical. (4) It is within the evolving microcontext of action and the human and nonhuman others populating it that decision making takes form first and foremost.

I progressively flesh out and expand on these principles underpinning my theory of decision making in action through the case of weather forecasting. And, in the final chapter of the book, I pull them together into a conceptual framework for the decision-making process that I elaborate further through the cases of medicine and finance. For now, let me briefly outline how each of these distinct but interrelated principles contributes to a more robust understanding of how decision making actually happens.

Decision Makers Operate in an Institutionalized Environment

No study of the decision-making process can afford to ignore the role of the environment in which decision makers operate. Seventy years ago, Herbert Simon, James March, and their collaborators debunked the myth of the rational man and paved the way for more rigorous research on the bounded rationality of real-world decision making precisely by drawing attention to the environmental as well as the cognitive constraints structuring human behavior.³ Even as it acknowledges the inherently bounded rationality of all decision makers, however, the bulk of the literature on judgment and decision making in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics today continues to cling to the optimality chimera to the detriment of real-world evidence. The fact that decision makers pursue satisficing rather than maximizing solutions as a matter of practice (Simon 1957, 204) has effectively been rendered analytically irrelevant. Decision making is divorced from its natural environment, and attention is instead devoted either to identifying suboptimal types of judgment via laboratory experiments and simulations or to devising optimizing models of bounded rationality.⁴

Yet it bears underscoring that only after shifting the unit of analysis from the individual to the group—or, most famously, to the organization—and theorizing the process of decision making in specific fields of action was Simon able to formulate his theory of bounded rationality. The moment it is examined as a social phenomenon, nonreducible to individual cognition, the process of decision making in the real world, although still imperfect, emerges as rational once again. For, in the course of enacting expected roles, decision makers come to rely on, and identify with, in-group conventions and performance standards, and they acquire an organizational personality: they turn into an "organized individual (Simon 1947, 278, emphasis added). Simon’s reconceptualization of the rational man into an administrative man" is not without its problems, as I discuss below, but it does provide an important opening for studying rationality as an externalized cognitive structure. Fifty years later, distributed cognition theory extends the scope of the decision-making environment from the social to the sociotechnical realm by drawing attention to the material culture and procedures enlisted to help store, process, and coordinate information during complex decision-making tasks (Hutchins 1995a, 1995b).

Within sociology, meanwhile, the notion of the organization as a cognitive system has been fruitfully combined with field theory (cf. Martin 2003) to model the emergence and institutionalization of decision-making environments at the interorganizational and supraorganizational level (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Powell, Packalen, and Whittington 2012). More recently, macroanalytic focus on the cognitively constraining influence of institutions is increasingly being complemented by attention to the microfoundations of organizational behavior. What drives efforts to bridge the micro-macro divide is growing recognition of the internal tensions and contradictions inherent in the logic of any institutional field given the complex of cultural symbols and material practices through which decision makers understand and organize their world (Thornton et al. 2012, 2; Friedland and Alford 1991, 248). Emphasizing that institutional contradictions provide both opportunities and constraints for creative local action, scholarship on institutional logics has generated new insight into how organizational actors transform and reproduce the environment in which they operate. Yet, having drawn attention to the importance of material practices, it typically stops short of actually attending to the host of artifacts and technologies through which logics become articulated. As a result, it has been at pains to account for the emergence and institutionalization of organizational routines without ultimately resorting to some kind of a top-down deus ex machina explanation of social order. There is increasing realization in the literature that a greater attention to the interlocking, or imbrication (Leonardi 2011), of the technological and the organizational could contribute to a richer understanding of the constitution, constraints, and affordances of institutional logics (Cloutier and Langley 2013, 364).

Decision Makers’ Stock of Knowledge Frames the Empirical Context of Action

Once one commits to considering decisions on their own terms, within their proper environment, it will not do to then proceed to study them removed from the actual scene of their production. Granted, it is no easy task to upend the original scholarly fixation on decision makers as rational, utility-maximizing actors but still maintain an appreciation for human actors as decision makers. Simon’s administrative man, despite being a significant improvement over the previously prevailing decision-making model of the rational man, has been variously criticized for offering a no less unrealistic portrayal of how decision makers operate in organizations. In the words of Langley et al. (1995, 266–67; emphasis in the original), Simon’s decision makers are "perhaps more life-size [but] hardly more life-like. Yet, if we are to take decisions on their own terms, we must reserve the same consideration for the people who actually produce them. In practice, however organized they may be, however much they may rely on institutionally sanctioned rules and procedures to efficiently carry out a task, decision makers can typically not afford to blindly follow protocol but must remain tactically alert to the task at hand, creatively adapting rules and procedures to the evolving circumstances of action and interaction. Far from being passive executors of the logic of the institutionalized environment in which they operate, actual decision makers are hard at work to successfully enact this logic into practical solutions, to make it workable, routinely exercising considerable discretion in the process. The gritty realities of decision making as situationally driven improvisation and craftwork, however, are consistently obscured in most accounts of organizational life. Explicitly or implicitly, decision-making action is treated as just another organizational output" (Allison and Zelikow 1999, 168ff.), with decision makers adhering mindlessly and inexorably to standard operating procedures.⁵ Simon’s administrative man lives on.

In no small part, the lack of sustained attention to the decision-making process as action in the extant literature (Nutt and Wilson 2010) can be directly attributed to the lack of a critical mass of sociologists expressly committed to the study of decision making as a sociological topic in its own right. The field continues to be dominated by cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists, while sociological contributions, although significant, remain scattered across a variety of substantive and analytic foci without a shared theoretical scope. Perhaps the most prominent of these has been scholarship that accounts for organizational disasters and failures.⁶ Although scarce, disaster studies make critical inroads toward a sociology of decision making because—above and beyond the usual sociological preoccupation with issues of organizing, group culture, innovation, or change—they are explicitly concerned with unearthing the reasons that led to a fateful decision. Adopting a systems approach to decision making, such studies are attentive to the latent pathogens (Reason 1990)—such as insufficient training, deferred maintenance, substandard communication, or dormant design flaws—that can contribute, often in cumulative ways, to a poor decision. Hence, poor decisions are no longer conceptualized as the result of faulty reasoning. And the dark side of organizations does not reside in the cover-up of mistakes and misconduct but, more profoundly, in the gradual routinization of nonconformity and, therefore, in the perilous expansion of what counts as acceptable risk (Vaughan 1999a, 1999b).

Still, because they are primarily interested in explaining decision failures, disaster studies arrive at the scene after the fact—too late to truly capture decision making in action.⁷ As a result, they tend to analytically privilege the logic of the organization over the individuals and groups embedded in it, thus undertheorizing the space for creative, strategic action afforded in practice by the various sociotechnical tensions inherent in any decision-making field. Needed are accounts of decision making that simultaneously illuminate both the institutionalized environment in which actors operate and the empirical context in which decision making actually unfolds. A notable exception is the work of organizational psychologist Karl Weick (1993; 1995), whose influential theory of organizational sensemaking draws attention to the retrospective rhetorical rationalizations decision makers frequently engage in to invent order out of informational equivocality as a result of the loose coupling between institutional logics and the empirical microcontext of decision-making action. Yet, whereas sense making—and risk management more generally—is often retrospective, the process of decision making is fundamentally prospective.⁸ Capturing how we make decisions calls for research designs that are both action centered and forward looking.

The recent turn to naturalistic studies of decision making in behavior economics and cognitive psychology marks an important step forward in this respect, but it has yet to systematically consider the cultural and broader social parameters of organizational life.⁹ Within sociology, meanwhile, although focus on the process of decision making in its own right is lacking, ethnographies of expert organizations have made great strides in bringing individuals back into institutional theory (Lawrence, Suddaby, and Leca 2009, 52) by shedding light on the local embeddedness of organizational meaning making and demonstrating that institutions are inhabited by individuals and groups doing things together (Hallett and Ventresca 2006, 213; Fine and Hallett 2014, 29). Despite occasional nods toward the role of material culture in shaping organizational life and group practices, however, they remain inattentive to the dynamics of human-nonhuman relations, their analytic gaze exclusively fastened on the realm of symbolic interactions.

To coax a more realistic model of decision-making action, I conceptualize the role of the institutionalized environment as primarily geared toward affording decision makers with what Alfred Schütz (1970, 74ff.) has called a stock of knowledge: a shared, established repertoire of techniques, rules of thumb, and other decision-making habits meant to make the decision-making task tractable in appropriate, institutionally sanctioned ways. Schütz’s stock of knowledge nicely encapsulates how organizations seek to steer individuals and groups toward rationally efficient decisions (Simon 1947). But it can also be extended to account for the dual nature of rules as both prescriptive and performative structures. It thus underscores the sociomaterially improvisational and context-specific character of decision-making practice by elaborating how actors make do with, reconfigure, and provisionally transform available tools and information to confront the inevitable messiness of concrete decision-making situations. Hence, decision makers are once again reinstituted as the makers of decisions, creating locally rational solutions out of the more or less institutionalized heuristics and techniques with which they have equipped themselves over time. The unit of analysis now is neither the individual nor the organization, but the task at hand.

Decision Making Is Habitual and Practical Action

Perhaps the most fundamental premise of my approach to decision making is that reasoning is always inexorably practical. Experts and expertise are established within particular communities of thought (Fleck 1979) precisely because these are also communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1990; Wenger 1998). Action properly constitutes and organizes judgment into being rather than simply turning it into an observable object of study (cf. Suchman 1987). My analytic foregrounding of decision making as externalized practice, therefore, very much represents a theoretical choice and not a methodological by-product. As such, this book is in step with the ongoing turn to practice across the social sciences (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and von Savigny 2001). Yet, whereas theories of practice typically emphasize the routinized, unconscious, and unthought aspects of action, my focus on the practice of decision making—a seeming oxymoron—also allows, indeed strains, for its conscious, deliberative, and meaning-making aspects. Surely making a decision is often not a mere matter of deploying a skill or passively carrying out institutionally sanctioned protocols but entails a creative response—both during nonroutine and during routine situations.

That decision-making practice is not as routinized and programmed as most conceptualizations of practice and decision making would suggest becomes readily apparent in knowledge-based settings, where practitioners are expected as a matter of course to continually keep streamlining and improving how they acquire and implement information. While hardly the only case in point, scientific practice, once again, offers the most obvious example of a decision-making activity that can be both habitual and not routinized. Hence the appeal of STS scholarship when one is in search of leads on how to keep analytically attuned to the whole range of decision-making practice. One runs across multiple, disparate, even conflicting approaches to accounting for scientific practice in the extant literature. But they all famously share one element in common: a rejection of the all too familiar human-centric bias of conventional theories of practice in favor of a properly object-oriented epistemology. Bruno Latour (1992) thus calls on us to rethink our disciplinary assumptions and allot equal consideration to the nonhuman missing masses that make up the fabric of social life. And Karin Knorr Cetina (2001) proposes a relational theory of objectual practice that conceives of knowledge work as fundamentally constituted in and through interactions with material objects rather than just other social actors. In the same vein, Trevor Pinch (2008) makes a case for integrating institutional theories of organizational behavior with a sociology of technology. Regardless of their specifics, all such conceptualizations point to the key role of the materiality—not just the corporeality—of action in structuring day-to-day problem solving. Yet, even in management studies, which have thus far been leading the effort to link organization theory with STS insights on sociomateriality, the overwhelming bulk of the literature continues to not take into account the role of technology in organizational life (Orlikowski and Scott 2008).

The notion that action is constituted in and through material relations has deep theoretical roots—most explicitly in the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. Etymologically derived from the Greek pragma, or thing, which shares the same root with such English words as practice or practical (cf. James 1907), pragmatism is founded on the materiality of practice and experience. The whole originality of pragmatism, writes William James (1909, 115–16), the whole point of it, is its concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it. Pragmatism has strongly influenced constructivist and situationist approaches in contemporary sociology, but this influence has been mostly indirect, mainly attributed through pragmatism’s influence on symbolic interactionism. Yet what gets lost by the lumping together of pragmatist and symbolic interactionist theories is precisely the materialist grounding of experience, which remains ignored or at best implied in most sociological accounts of action and interaction.¹⁰ For pragmatists, as John Dewey (1922, 18) has so pointedly articulated, experience is double-barrelled: It recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. Thing and thought . . . refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience.

Of late, sociologists are turning to pragmatism in increasing numbers.¹¹ Although the materiality of action continues to be left in the background, what does get foregrounded by this pragmatist turn in sociology is the practicality of action. Action at last emerges as decidedly nonteleological and nonnormative, with social actors motivated by ad hoc real-world problems rather than preset goals, values, or beliefs (Joas 1996; Swidler 2001, 81ff.). As such, while purposive, action is inherently flexible, improvisational, and opportunistic. Problem solving—and decision making more generally—hardly adheres to a premeditated and internally coherent course of action in practice, despite one’s best intentions or avowals to the contrary. Instead, actors are confronted with a messy ongoing flow of situations, where ends blend into means and it is the resources at hand that lend concrete shape to goals in the first place (Dewey 1939, 40ff.; Whitford 2002, 37–38). Intense awareness eventually gives way to habit, of course, and most action ends up following a well-tried and familiar path until it stumbles on what seems a novel or challenging situation. Even habitual action, however, need not be mechanical and mindless but often constitutes a quite intelligent performance, betraying the thoughtful, nuanced sensitivity of an experienced practitioner. John Dewey’s (1922, 65–66) crucial but overlooked distinction between intelligent habit and routine habit bears quoting at length:

All habit involves mechanization. . . . But mechanization is not of necessity all there is to habit. . . . Mechanism is indispensable. If each act has to be consciously searched for at the moment and intentionally performed, execution is painful and the product is clumsy and halting. Nevertheless the difference between the artist and the mere technician is unmistakable. The artist is a masterful technician. The technique or mechanism is infused with thought and feeling. The mechanical performer permits the mechanism to dictate the performance. It is absurd to say that the latter exhibits habit and the former not. We are confronted with two kinds of habit, intelligent and routine. All life has its élan, but only the prevalence of dead habits deflects life into mere élan.

To say, then, that the practice of decision making is habitual is not to say that it is routinized. On the contrary, within a pragmatist perspective the structure/agency binary becomes relegated to the two extremes of decision-making practice.¹² Unlike Bourdieu’s top-down explanation of the process of habituation, Dewey regards the embodiment of habits as an ongoing intelligent achievement (Dewey 1922, 38ff.). For Dewey, as John Levi Martin (2011, 263) puts it, habit stands for our general capacity to tool ourselves to fit the world (see also Hickman 1990). Decision making is discerningly creative and skillfully resourceful precisely because it is based on practiced, habitual ways of reasoning and doing. Ann Swidler’s influential reconceptualization of culture as a tool kit of incongruous—because pragmatically assembled—resources evocatively captures the sort of situational improvisation that decision makers engage in as a matter of course. Swidler (2001) focuses primarily on the semiotic dimension of cultural repertoires, but her conceptualization can be readily extended to accommodate a more materialist understanding of culture, where meanings are proliferated through epistemic objects (Knorr Cetina 2001), articulated into blueprints for action, and rendered intelligible through bodily experience (see also Lizardo and Strand 2010). Decision-making habits are rarely passive or frozen because decision makers are charged with making decisions—with combining available resources to fashion a provisionally coherent solution to the routine and nonroutine challenges of the evolving task at hand.

Because it actively avoids a priori assumptions about the nature of practice and because it invites a symmetric consideration of both the social and the material conditions of action, I enlist pragmatist theory to serve as the basis for my theory of decision making. With it as the backdrop, I am able to draw out and meld together the complementary strengths of STS scholarship on knowledge production with cognitive, behaviorist, and sociological elaborations of bounded rationality. Thus refocused, the STS effort to debunk mentalistic explanations of expertise by establishing that reasoning and rationality take form outside the brain, within sociotechnical ecologies of practice, becomes a natural extension of pragmatist theory of action. And, translated into a cognate idiom, studies of organizational decision making are brought into conversation with studies of laboratory science: the former introduce an all-important institutional dimension to knowledge production, while the latter insist that decision makers are not judgmental dopes (Garfinkel 1967, 67) but purposeful actors creatively negotiating the microcontingencies of their environment.

Decision Making Takes Form within the Microcontext of Action

The last guiding assumption about the process of decision making follows naturally out of the three previous ones. I will therefore refrain from additional programmatic statements and wait instead until subsequent, empirically grounded chapters to make the case that the unit of analysis best suited for capturing decision making in action is the task at hand. It is this last, and most crucial, guiding assumption that allows for the socialized, processual, materialist, and dynamic character of decision-making practice to fully emerge into view. To showcase the role of the empirical context in shaping meteorological decisions, I have endeavored as much as possible to present decision-making action in the form of entire episodes rather than snippets. This is particularly the case in the later chapters of the book, once readers have become familiar with basic aspects of weather forecasting operations. In doing so, I am able to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between processes of prognosis and diagnosis in the making of decisions. Contra conventional decision-making models, which take decision ends as fixed and only inquire into the means used to attain them, my theory of decision making relies on Dewey’s conceptualization of the dynamics between prognosis and diagnosis as an ends-means continuum: faced with a challenging situation, decision makers entertain several possible courses of action, which are simultaneously preliminary descriptions of the problem and its solution; these incomplete descriptions prompt the gathering of new information and renewed, iterative prognostic evaluations of the best course of action until a decision is reached—that is, until a satisfactory joint description of the problem and its solution has been achieved. Truly, as I shall show, decision making takes form within the microcontext of action.

Having settled on the appropriate analytic lens for studying decision making, it is now time to settle on the appropriateness of my chosen case study. This is a common enough