Since the 1960s, Canada’s federal department of health has been mandated to review the safety of medications, pre-market and post-market. For fifty years, therefore, doctors, pharmacists, and scientists in the Canadian public service have been making routine decisions about the safety of medications. These public servants’ routines, however, have changed through time alongside technological developments and re-organizations of the bureaucracy. Some alterations in routines have had implications on the everyday reasoning and judgements public servants can be make about safety issues, even altering their notice of safety issues. Based on public servants’ own accounts, the presentation describes how routine reasoning activities in select areas of drug safety review have changed over the past fifty years with the cumulative shift from technologies such as paper files and pigeon hole furniture to various database systems. Although the priorities of managerialism (e.g., performance standards, productivity quotas) have unevenly filtered into these areas of drug review over the past few decades, one particular sort of database system appears to anchor those priorities into public servants’ workday, orienting their attention in drug review in particular ways.

Speaker: Jennifer Cuffe is an anthropologist (Ph.D., McGill) and a government archivist who investigates the routine reasoning of professionals in the Canadian public service. Her previous fieldwork explored the way in which scientific staff at Health Canada made everyday regulatory decisions about the safety and efficacy of traditional and herbal medicines. She is currently completing a FRQSC-funded research project titled “Histoires de bases de données électroniques dans la bureaucratie fédérale,” as an Honorary University Fellow in the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter (UK), and as Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University.