Strategies for organizing outages

Based on four sociological studies carried out in France and in the United States between 1991 and 1994, this paper aims at presenting different organizational strategies for scheduled outages in nuclear power plants. Some short examples suggest that organizational settings are not equivalent in terms of actors' practices: some organizational designs tend to minimize actors autonomy while others are favouring it. Distinctions can also be made between formal and informal autonomy or between clear delegations of decision making power and implicit ones. The author argues that these differences have major implications for actors' participation inside the organization