They offer a snapshot of rhythms as they unravel and are braided back together again, capturing the work that is needed to keep them going. Disruptions, in this view, are not freak accidents or aberrations but natural, constitutive features of lived normality. It is important not to confuse disruption with disorder. Breakdowns may trigger individual road rage or anger at frozen food melting away during a blackout, but, collectively, communities are remarkably creative in producing alternative orders. Rhythms and habits are interspersed with disjunctures and connected via suspensions, interferences and repair work. Disruptions thus reveal the elasticity of everyday life. They also open up its politics. A power failure, a water shortage or a public transport system breaking down can raise questions about accountability (who is to blame), entitlement and social justice (who should get what) and, most profoundly, about ‘normality’ (how can or should members of a society live). Disruption therefore is a particularly useful way to explore connections between practices, politics and socio-technical systems.
Disruptions are as varied as they are plentiful. Accidents, breakdowns, a product flaw, strikes and disasters differ in scale, dynamic and effect. A flat tyre is not the sinking of the Titanic. The effects of a burst local water main are not those of a fire at a power station, which can plunge millions of people into darkness, as happened in Engköping, Sweden, on 27 December 1983. Some disruptions are small, like the newspaper that is again not delivered in time for breakfast, but can irritate people more than the much larger one-off damage caused by a flooded basement. Many disruptions are invisible, like the temporary hardware breakdowns of spam engines, and only brought to our attention by software alerting us to delays in email. Would a 30-second stop at a subway station in front of a red signal be experienced as a delay, before Tube conductors began to inform us about them as a matter of routine, apologizing for the ‘disruption to our journey’? All these are, again, different from major disruptions of socio-economic cycles, like a depression and mass unemployment, which, as Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues showed in their pioneering study of Marienthal, Austria, in 1933, changed the most basic rhythms of bodily time and movement, leading people to walk more slowly and drift through the day (Jahoda et al. 1933).
‘Disasters’ have been the type of disruption that has received most attention, especially from experts on contingency, crisis management and the organizational risks of tightly coupled systems (Perrow 1999; Scanlon 2001). We can also, however, come to disasters from the other end, asking about how ordinary people cope with them. How do disruptions play themselves out, once they have struck? How do people respond? How (and how much) do disruptions transform the rhythms of everyday life, in the short- and in the long-run. It is easy to date when a disaster strikes. But it also carries a longer tail behind it, and its length depends on social and political dynamics, separate from whatever had triggered the initial breakdown in the first place. For example, a power outage hit Buenos Aires on 15 February
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