This article addresses the issue of organizational resilience in a structural context marked by complexity, change and distribution of activities between interdependent occupational groups. We adopt an interactionist approach, relying mostly on the works of E.C. Hughes and A. Strauss to show how articulation within and between groups can affect the achievement of organizational goals (safety and production) in the face of unexpected events. The paper is based on an empirical study of teams involved in major modernization projects of the rail transport system and facing critical, risky and very constrained work situations. Our empirical results describe in depth the nature of arrangements and negotiations made within and between occupational groups to articulate the work. We show how organizational conditions affect these arrangements and finally the resilience of the project organization and groups within it. We then discuss our results in four main points, aiming to give a more general scope to our results. Our first two points demonstrate how professional rivalries and asymmetric relations lead to a displacement in organizational goals and affect resilience. Our third point assesses the role and the limits of both informal and formal arrangements in articulation and resilience. We finally show how adopting an interactionist perspective questions the notion of resilience for an organization as a whole.

Organizations that manage complex technologies use planning in various forms to determine priorities and structure work with the goal of controlling both production and system reliability. In addition to this purely functional view of planning, there is a social dimension that also has important system safety implications. Drawing on 53 semi-structured interviews with workers at a nuclear fuel processing plant, this paper addresses the role of the schedule for planned maintenance work. Characterizing the schedule as a boundary object highlights the socio-material dimension of high reliability organizing. It sheds light on the negotiation that takes place at the boundary between five worker groups around the schedule, which allows cooperation without the need for consensus thanks to the interpretive flexibility. Diversity of views is acknowledged, but resolved sufficiently. A 'reliable' schedule is one that is accurate enough to facilitate necessary conversations without providing unnecessary constraints. It is a balance between what should be brought to light and what should deliberately be left in the shadows. Yet, the possibility for the schedule to act as a boundary object and to support interdepartmental coordination and organizational reliability depends on organizational and occupational conditions. When managers see the schedule as an object of control, they seek to impose additional standardization. Taken to the extreme, introducing rigidity into the system is aimed at organizational invariance that HRO researchers warn is not the key to reliable operations. The role and legitimacy of planners is also discussed, as a safeguard against the schedule becoming a fantasy plan.

Using a qualitative research approach, this article addresses a gap in the project management literature that is the coexistence of exploitation and exploration learning dynamics within a single large-scale and complex project. We investigate the case of the New Sodium Fast Reactor (NewSFR) project, a large-scale, complex, and multi-actor project aimed at designing a new technology of nuclear reactor. Through a grounded, interpretive, and multilevel methodological approach, we characterize NewSFR as a hybrid project that combines high exploration and exploitation goals. We investigate the hybridizing process, which takes into account long-term temporal dynamics and interactions between two levels of analysis: the knowledge domains within the project and the project itself. This enables us to report three major contributions. First, at a macro-level, we highlight the ambiguity related to the difficulty for project members to agree on either exploratory or exploitative NewSFR status, which leads us to qualify it as a hybrid project. We then investigate the case dynamically and at a micro-level (i.e., the level of knowledge domains within the project). We emphasize the temporal processes underlying the hybridization, and how this hybridization evolves in time through two data-based concepts: deliberate exploration and emerging exploration. We identify and categorize the main drivers of deliberate and emerging exploration throughout the project, and highlight how these drivers affect project management processes. Finally, we discuss the issue of managing such hybrid projects.

The future of nuclear power depends on the interests and decisions. To take the relevant deep uncertainty into account, a new methodology of robustness analysis of fuel cycle strategies has been developed. The method has been applied to the French cycle, considering the future deployment of fast reactor as the preselected objective and an uncertain change, called disruption, towards a new objective: the minimization of transuranic inventories without fast reactor. The status of plutonium is contradictory in two cases. Two approaches of identifying robust strategies were tested, which correspond respectively to the static and adaptive robustness assessment. One identifies static strategies in a pre-disruption scenario, which achieve acceptable outcomes for both objectives. The other takes a trajectory pursuing the pre-selected objective and, in case of disruption, adapts it for the new objective. The comparison of two approaches indicates the temporality of adaptation relative to immediate actions under the uncertain disruption.

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La plupart des études empiriques menées sur la fiabilité organisationnelle se sont centrées sur les activités les plus visibles et les plus directement liées à cette dernière : appontage sur les porte-avions, conduite et maintenance des centrales nucléaires, gestion de services d’urgence et de blocs opératoires… Dans cet article, nous entendons au contraire orienter notre analyse vers les activités « interstitielles » qui, tout en étant en contact direct avec des activités « nobles », restent à leur frontière sans y être pleinement intégrées. Une étude de terrain menée sur la manutention lourde dans une industrie du secteur nucléaire permet d’analyser en profondeur ce type d’activité. Nous nous appuierons sur les théories pragmatistes de l’activité et sur les approches communicationnelles de l’organisation pour proposer une définition originale des activités interstitielles et identifier quatre de leurs caractéristiques observables. Nous analyserons également les effets de mise en vigilance et de décloisonnement de l’organisation que les activités interstitielles produisent, renforçant ainsi la fiabilité de l’organisation dans son ensemble. Enfin, nous discuterons de la contribution du concept d’activité interstitielle aux recherches sur les organisations distribuées, dans lesquelles l’articulation aux frontières de celles-ci est pensée au travers des dispositifs de gestion, des objets et des individus.

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