Exploring the Grey Area of Cyber Security in Industrial Control Systems (ICS)
Alberto Zanutto · 2021
Building on Turner’s contribution and qualitative methods, this chapter explores a new research field for organisational scholars of hazardous systems and qualitative methods: securing production processes and technologies against malicious cyber-attacks that arise in the global network. Organisations face the possibility of being attacked on a daily basis and often delegate the work of securing Industrial Control Systems (ICS) to technical artefacts or experts. This chapter explores how risk is socially performed in such socio-technical systems, and how the work of cyber security managers, business managers, IT specialists, as well as general employees, who work on security is shaped by organisational social habits. Taking a multifaceted qualitative research approach allows the exploration of these hidden areas, and the chapter concludes with a suggestion to adopt a metaphorical analysis through consideration of novel processes like “neglect,” “oblivion” and “confinement,” which, among others, may be useful metaphors of organisational choices in the context of cyber security.