Dead Reckoning is an historical ethnography covering the life course of the air traffic control system from system emergence through 2017. Based on archival research and field work in four air traffic control facilities, the book focuses on how historical conditions, social actors, and events in the system’s institutional environment – political, economic, technological, cultural – impact the air traffic organization, changing it, and how in turn those changes affect not only the social, technological, and material arrangements of the workplace, but also controllers’  interpretive work, cultural understandings, and work practices. Far from a top-down model, controllers – the workers at the bottom of the hierarchy – respond to these events, making repairs that supply organizational resilience. Building on work on institutional logics, boundaries and boundary work, culture and cognition, and expertise, the case demonstrates the connection between institutional change, agency, and persistence over the life course.