A pragmatist approach of audit practices : safety demonstration and safety assessment through technical dialogue

In France, nuclear risks are partly governed by a "technical dialog" surrounding safety demonstrations. In order to get an authorization for creating, running, or dismantling a nuclear installation, each nuclear operator must demonstrate to the ASN, and the national expert IRSN, that everything will be fine in the field. The purpose of this paper is to examine, with Dewey's Theory of Valuation, by which methods action is conducted when a demonstration is to be produced by a nuclear operator, and an assessment by IRSN. Indeed, a stabilized literature has thought auditing practices, but without clarification concerning how actors demonstrate or assess what has to be evaluated. We study two cases, one related to a demonstration and the other to an assessment. We mainly rely on document collection, and did a few interviews to complement. We analyzed the material through document analysis (types of documents and of intertextuality), and then did a narrative analysis based on two interpretive frameworks. Our results show that each organization realizes a management of beliefs and doubts, its own and those of other organizations. They also unfold 8 kinds of works, implemented in both cases, and finally show how they contribute to the management of managerial issues of auditing practices. We thus contribute to literature of these interorganizationnal relationships, by giving a few elements toward a pragmatist approach of them. We suggest that, as researchers, we should investigate more deeply these objects from a methodological standpoint, and make a few methodological and managerial contributions.