A pragmatist approach to audit practices : two cases of technical dialog from nuclear risk governance in France

Audits are increasingly used by risk governance as a mode of risk management (Power, 1997). They are known to be successful when auditors are both independent and competent, and to be influenced by the effects of valuations, formalization, informal interactions and vocabularies employed in the field. However, very little research clarifies how audits occur in practice from start to finish. This paper aims at contributing to the analysis of audit practices through a study of nuclear risk governance in France. Audit dialogues, here called "technical dialogues", are based on "safety demonstrations". We propose a pragmatist approach based on Dewey's Theory of Valuation (1939) in order to investigate methods that are used by field actors to demonstrate or assess safety. We draw from two cases, the preparation of a safety demonstration by a nuclear operator and the production of a safety assessment by the IRSN (the nuclear technical support organization in France). For each case, we carried out a document collection (e-mails, work documents, meeting reports…, 404 doc, around 10.000p. total) that we complemented with 11 interviews (18h. total). We analyzed each corpus through their intertextuality and then made a narrative analysis of the production of each official document. The overall value of our results is that they shed light on the "technical dialogue", a little-known risk governance device, through a detailed description of field actors conducts. Surprisingly, they show that the technical dialogue is not a place for exchanges of certainties and justifications, but of doubts and beliefs. In this context, we identify several features of the technical dialogue. First, auditor and auditee manage beliefs and doubts differently depending on their own situations and interests. But secondly, both apply the same work categories, related to (1) managing attention paid to document reading (2) use of the document to solve a problem and (3) collection of written resources. Finally, we identify the role of this work in the (different) management of beliefs and doubts. These results invite to understand the classical factors of audit practices from their practical consequences, getting activity as a starting point and aiming at understanding how both auditor and auditee experience the dialogue. The paper calls more broadly for a renewal of risk governance, paying attention to how actors manage doubts and beliefs. Suggestion is made to practitioners to highlight the importance of dialogue, of doubt production, and of sizing of bureaucratic work.