[Themaintainers] New Forthcoming Piece Identifying Institutional Challenges Facing the U.S. Bridge System

Lee Vinsel lee.vinsel at gmail.com
Wed Oct 10 13:27:37 EDT 2018


Hello everyone,

I just wanted to share an announcement that Carnegie Mellon professor
Daniel Armanios and his student Jaison Desai made about a forthcoming
publication on bridge infrastructure. A lot of people kvetch and moralize
about the state of infrastructure - me included - but studying the matter
and how it impacts lives empirically is much harder. Daniel and his
students have been creating a number of novel (often mixed) methods to get
at the issue. This paper is one example, and I look forward to reading it.

Daniel and Jaison have said that they'd be happy to field questions on here
or chat via email if anyone has thoughts.

Best,

Lee


Dearest Colleagues and Mentors:

I wanted to send all of you an email to share with you our new forthcoming
publication in the *Journal of Infrastructure Systems* that we thought may
interest all of you:
https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29IS.1943-555X.0000451.
This was spearheaded by my advisee Jaison Desai who recently graduated and
is now back with the US Army working in their Cyber Command group.

In this piece, we try to understand a simple challenge - given we have very
capable engineering systems that are equipped to diagnose and remediate
outdated infrastructure, why do some of these systems still persist and for
so long? In this piece, we argue that perhaps these challenges may not just
be technological but also institutional.

To advance these arguments, we reconceptualize outdated infrastructure
systems as "institutional relics". They are "institutional" in that these
systems are designed with the best standards and professional norms of the
time. They are "relics" in that these choices are built right into the
physical properties of the bridge, and as these standards and norms change,
these systems persist with now outdated design standards and norms. Using
panel data from the National Bridge Inventory from 1992-2012 (N=
666,206-716,436 bridges/year) and bridge clearance heights as a bridge
property that has experienced standards changes over time, we identify and
find support for two forms of relics - regulative and normative. Regulative
is when an infrastructure system has been built prior to a major standard
reform such that this policy now renders this system outdated. Normative is
when local engineering norms and priorities conflict with national ones
such that an infrastructure system built in a certain area is also likely
to reflect particular local rather than more general national priorities.
These effects persist even when controlling for financing available for
such projects, bridge deck, superstructure, and substructure condition
ratings, bridge material and design, amongst other factors.

The main engineering and sociological implications of this piece is that
for typical updated infrastructure, longevity is good. However, when these
systems no longer reflect modern standards (i.e. become relics), such
longevity may actually become a liability. Our approach here uses
sociological theory to help bridge engineers identify additional metrics -
such as year built, not necessarily age, and bridge location and owner - to
further target limited infrastructure funds towards bridges whose
remediation present just technical and economic but also social costs.
Moreover, we also show how such theory and analysis could help inform other
infrastructure system trends such as scour remediation and the location of
load postings where there has been similar such issues as those identified
here. The key takeaway is bridge managers need to consider metrics that
better capture not just current structural needs but also factors that may
have changed at the time when the bridge was initially constructed. At the
same time, this piece is a nice initial foray to address key outstanding
questions in institutional theory, namely while we increasingly understand
how institutional systems persist or change, we have less understanding of
how these systems are decommissioned and/or replaced.

Given its unusual journal outlet placement (a sociologically driven piece
in a civil engineering journal), we are so excited about the potential of
this piece to further spur more scholarly dialog between organizational
sociology and civil engineering that many of you helped advance in recent
years and whose shoulders we stand on!

Sincerely,

Jaison & Daniel

----------------------
Daniel Armanios
Assistant Professor
Department of Engineering and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Baker Hall 126B2
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Phone: 412-268-7039
Email: darmanios at cmu.edu
Website: http://www.cmu.edu/epp/people/faculty/daniel-armanios.html

-- 
Assistant Professor
Department of Science, Technology, and Society
Virginia Tech
leevinsel.com
Twitter: @STS_News
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