What was perhaps of more interest was what happened afterwards: how pundits and rugby players argued that it was not a sending off. In essence the debate is about what a standard is and how they should be enforced. And that debate is similar to what Ive written about in relation to the standards of the TB test. Here's what I mean.
In the Guardian, Eddie Butler wrote of the Warburton sending off:
"there is always a choice. Something should have registered with the referee other than a black-and-white regulation. This was a foul, no question, but it was not a killer tackle. It was a yellow-card offence... If you lay down the law in unambiguous terms you are inviting ambition to be a more important factor on the field than a feel for the occasion. Rolland could not show compassion because it would jeopardise his chances of reffing another World Cup final. It was a pity, because his justice wrecked the occasion...The laws of rugby depend as much on interpretation as implementation. Refereeing a top game of international rugby is a fiendishly difficult job, but it is not made any easier by people trying to make it clearer. Rugby is what it is, obscure and open to flexible interpretation. Sam Warburton is a victim of rigid justice".
This kind of analysis was not limited to the Guardian. In the clip above, you will hear Lawrence Dallaglio and Francois Pienaar go on about the "occasion", how this was a "semi-final", how it was early in the game, and how no malice was intended. Mick Cleary in the Telegraph said similar:
"Any match, let alone a World Cup semi-final, is for the players and the fans, not for the hidebound detail of disciplinary protocol. The contest, as well as the spectacle, was grievously scarred by Rolland’s pedantry".The point is that context matters, something that protocols and rigid standards cannot cope with - the broader interests of the game. Worse, they simply represent top-down power, denying the rights and skill of a referee to make up their own mind.
A similar point is made by medical and organisational sociologists. Firstly, that tighter you define rules, the easier is becomes for something to fail: what might be better is a set of looser rules. And secondly, that standards need to vary in order to work. This is the argument put forward by Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg in the critique of protocols. In Marc Berg's book Rationalising Medical Decision Making its argued that protocols emerged out of a battle to make medicine more scientific, more rational but in doing so led to the erosion of other forms of expertise, not easily codified into formal language (there are some good studies, for example, of nurses' intuitive knowledge and its successful application in practical settings).
Timmermans and Berg take this further and argue that standards only work when they are allowed to vary locally - what they call local universality. The argument goes - like organisational sociologists - that unless standards have flexibility to meet local conditions and circumstances they simply wont work. Doctors, nurses, whoever are simply not going to follow certain routines if they dont fit with their environment. Better to allow them a degree of flexibility, to interpret what needs to be done. Flexibility wins out over rigid standards.
Something like this is what I argue is going on in TB Testing. There is a set standard to follow, but vets don't follow it always - that's common knowledge. The question is why this happens and does it matter? In the paper I suggest a number of reasons why it happens, from failure to enforce (i.e. the absence of coercive pressure legimises failure to follow the protocol), the training process and the creation of working cultures which may act as a coping mechanism to deal with high volumes of testing. In my posts on OV procurement, Ive also described how vets' emotional stakes in farmers' TB results may also lead to interpretations being cast on what counts as a reactor. But perhaps the main reason is that testing is dangerous. As one vet described to me recently, in order to comply with one EU directive, you have to break others. In this context, its unsurprising to see a bit of local universality going on.
The extent to which it matters also depends on context. Many vets will say that some variations in the protocol simply do not matter - the DNV report certainly finds that. Perhaps that is why government attempts to improve quality control has been so absent? Perhaps it also relates to the urban myth/reality that the protocol was simply made up quickly when the EU asked the UK for one by someone in Whitehall without speaking to practicing vets? But lets take something more definitive to do with the test: ear tags. Does it matter if you don't check them all? Maybe there's a reactor hidden in the shed or a cow with milk fever at the bottom of the field. It might be useful then. But what if we didn't have eartags, like in New Zealand? In a different system of regulation where trust is not based in the practices of audit, but in forms of self-regulation within the community affected by TB, then that step can be done away with. Its no longer integral to the test.
Standards, then. They aren't definitive: they are just products of the environments we live in.
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