Organizations as Contexts: Implications for Safety Science and Practice

Abstract

A theory of organizations as contexts frames the kinds of objective and subjective evidence needed for systematic analyses of the conditions under which accidents and incidents occur, are recovered from, or are prevented. Contexts of risk-handling activities in high-hazard production systems are seen as supraindividual and self-governing entities, structured by social and cultural properties such as goals, resources, communication, meanings and categories, and intercontext relationships. The concept of self-governance equalizes the importance of lateral and executive control for safety management. Actors' access to and degree of perceived and objective control over resources become significant data, as do data relating to communicative, cultural, and coordination issues. Context theory highlights several issues in safety research and practice and organizational studies generally, and it suggests new approaches to incident investigations and organizational learning.My aim in this article is to identify the kinds of evidence needed for explaining actors' responses to safety-threatening events organizationally and systematically The context theory I outline views organizations as constituted by intersecting, overlapping, and interacting contexts of risk-handling activities structured by global and local social and cultural practices. I conclude by exploring the implications of this theory for safety research and practice and for organizational studies generally.

THE DARK SIDE OF ORGANIZATIONS: Mistake, Misconduct, and Disaster

“…This new work discloses "the operational realities of risk handling" (Carroll & Perin 1995:22), showing how the technology mystifies and how organizational and institutional factors affect the work process, contributing to failures. Both intelligent technology and intelligent humans have limited ability to cope with inconceivable occurrences, promoting "the reasonable choice of disaster" (Lanir 1989); people are taught modes of success, not modes of failure (Schulman 1993); training is for single failures, not complex interactive ones (Meshkati 1991); risk-handling resources are inadequate (Perin 1995); minor flaws and errors are accepted due to deadlines (Pate-Cornell 1990); schedules, resources, and commitments to hardware produce questionable fixes rather than change (Starbuck & Milliken 1988a).…”

Latent errors and adverse organizational consequences: a conceptualization

“…We have a limited understanding of whether and how contextual features of these settings may alter findings from previous research. Given the focus of early high-reliability research on high-hazard settings, few studies examine high-reliability processes across comparative settings (see Perrin, 1995, for an exception). Several influential case studies provide vivid descriptions of the specific contexts such as the accident at Tenerife (Weick, 1990) and the operations aboard aircraft carriers (Weick & Roberts, 1993).…”

Operating as Experimenting: Synthesizing Engineering and Scientific Values in Nuclear Power Production

“…The daily work of running a single reactor unit is carried out by anywhere from 200 to 1,000 people; during refueling and maintenance outages taking from one to three months, contractors increase the population by about one-third (at one plant, the number nearly doubles) (Carroll, Perin, and Marcus 1993;Perin 1993). At many nuclear generating stations, there are multiple reactor units (two and four being the most common).…”