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This chapter focuses on the constraints affecting the ATLAS Collaboration's procurement processes. The construction of ATLAS is an industrial-scale undertaking, and the collaboration therefore has to turn to industry for help. In so far as it avails itself of CERN's procurement services to help manage its interactions with external players, it is constrained to follow its procedures, which, unsurprisingly, given that the laboratory is a public entity, are fairly detailed and bureaucratic. The competitive processes presupposed by CERN's procurement procedures, however, do not always square with the more open and cooperative relationships that the ATLAS Collaboration seeks to establish with its suppliers in order to confront the technical uncertainties that it encounters. Through three mini case studies, the chapter explores the issue and puts forward a way of addressing it.

A complex procurement process is used by corporations that try to secure business with government agencies. It involves cost or pricing data, vendor quotations, production methods, cost trends, decrements, resources, and other things. A government auditor reviewed one such contract more than twenty years after the planes had been manufactured and concluded that fraud had been involved. The government first alleged that the contract used plain language and that this showed fraud. Linguistic analysis agreed that plain language was used, but that this language showed that nothing was fraudulent. Syntax and lexical uses (“assessment” and “estimate” in particular) were shown to be clear and supported by dictionary citations. After reviewing the linguistic analysis, the government changed its theory, now arguing that the corporation's words, such as “consideration,” “estimates,” “appropriate,” and “based on our review of,” were clear plain language but that the government's understanding was different from the corporation's. This opened the door to discovery of what those understandings were, appearing largely in the depositions of the government auditors. These revealed their inferences about the meanings of words and expressions the corporation had used in its proposal. The plaintiff's confusion was located in what the corporation did not say in its proposal. If the auditors did not understand how these expressions were being used, the speech act of requesting clarification was readily available. It was pointed out that requesting this would have been appropriate before the government granted the proposal.

This chapter draws on the results of a survey to look at what external suppliers get out of their interactions with the ATLAS Collaboration. The detector is a source of ‘stretch goals’ for the firms that supply its components, allowing the collaboration to present itself as a ‘lead user’ of innovative goods and services provided by these firms. In short, ATLAS acts as a stimulus to organization learning by its suppliers and helps them to build up the social capital necessary to profit from it.