Theorizing and theory building in the safety sciences: A reflective inquiry

Klockner, Karen; Pillay, Manikam

doi:10.1016/j.ssci.2019.04.023

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Prior to selecting a research methodology, it is important for researchers to elucidate the philosophical and theoretical positions upon which their contributions are based. This will assist in explaining why some methods are appropriate for conducting certain types of research [32], and also connect the basic assumptions inherent in the paradigms and theoretical positioning used [33]. In this regard, the research paradigm and theoretical perspectives play an important role in organisational safety research.…”

Section: Research Paradigm and Theoretical Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Resilience Engineering: An Integrative Review and Framework for Bench-Marking Organisational Safety

Pillay

Morel

2020

Safety

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Interest in resilience engineering for improving organisational safety continues to grow among safety scholars and practitioners, but little attention has focused on a unifying definition, characteristics, and instruments for quantitative measurements. This is a significant gap which can impede efforts at benchmarking and evaluating resilience engineering for organisational safety. This integrative review was undertaken to address this research-practice gap in order to inform a theoretical framework. A five steep integrative literature review process was used to retrieve and critically evaluate peer-reviewed quantitative research articles published or in press from 2003 to November 2019. From the 3884 studies identified, screened, and selected, 17 met the final inclusion criteria. In total, 15 specific instruments were identified, but only four were grounded on a theoretical framework or model—the most common instrument used for included structured surveys. A minimum of three and a maximum of 13 characteristics were measured; however, it is not clear what type of variables they represented. The six most common characteristics included top management commitment, just culture, learning culture, awareness, preparedness, and flexibility. An integrative model of how these can inform a Resilience Climate Questionnaire (RCQ) survey is presented.

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Section: Research Paradigm and Theoretical Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Resilience Engineering: An Integrative Review and Framework for Bench-Marking Organisational Safety

Pillay

Morel

2020

Safety

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“…One of the principal efforts within the RE discipline has been the anchoring of the notion of resilience to some form of clearly describable features or attributes to enable the development of an operational means for the assessment of resilience [8,20,22,28]. There have been a few attempts to provide meanings, features, attributes or properties to the concept of RE and to this end two of the pioneering contributors, considered by many to be the founding fathers of RE, David Woods and Eric Hollnagel, have been endeavouring to provide a measurement and assessment framework.…”

Section: The Resilience Age Of Safety-safety I and Safety Iimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, each concept stimulates lines of inquiry and has its own defining features requiring various definitions depending on which lens is being used to look at resilience. A recent paper published in this journal by Pillay and Morel [9], which focused on measuring resilience engineering and bench-marking organisational safety, listed 12 varying definitions and resulted in the authors offering the following description in an attempt to provide a unified definition, "RE is a perspective for organisational safety management which enables organisational members to actively anticipate, respond, monitor and learn; by adapting to operate at the boundary of safe operations by narrowing the gap between work as imagined and work as performed; and manifested in an organisation's culture, cognition and behaviours" [9] (p. 20).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Spider graphs were developed for each of the 4 potentials to identify where resilience efforts should be directed for each potential, as well as examining results as a big picture resilience RAG model, of where the organisation was in relation to the overall management of their potential to be resilience. The pilot program was embedded in the philosophy of pragmatism which is used extensively in the Safety Sciences as a problem-solving research methodology and which points towards a stage 3 approach in model cumulative theory development as proposed by Klockner and Pillay [20] whereby a pilot study is undertaken to advance theory into practice research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Measuring Resilience Potentials: A Pilot Program Using the Resilience Assessment Grid

Klockner

Meredith

2020

Safety

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Researchers in the resilience engineering space have proposed the notion that organisations operating in complex socio-technical systems cannot ‘be’ resilient but can have the ‘potential for resilient performance’. This theoretical stance also suggests that organisations wanting to enhance their potential for resilience begin by measuring their operational safety performance against four key potentials, these being: the Potential to Anticipate; the Potential to Respond; the Potential to Learn; and the Potential to Monitor. Furthermore, to measure these four key resilience constructs, organisations have been recommended to use a Resilience Assessment Grid (RAG) developed as part of this theory. However, scarce research appears to have been conducted that bridges the theory and practice divide on just how organisations can pragmatically measure their current performance against these four resilience potentials using the RAG. Therefore, this research was interested in undertaking a pilot study using RAG theory in order to examine an organisation’s four resilience potentials, and was conducted within a large road transport organisation in Australia. Results indicated that measuring both the four individual potentials and a combination of the four potentials was possible using a RAG and proved effective in providing a snapshot of operational safety system resilience concepts. Recommendations on how to increase organisational resilience potentials were provided to ensure future safety endeavours would enhance the organisation’s potential to be resilience in the face of system variability and operational demands.

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Investigating Collective Mindfulness in Mining: A Prospective Study in High-Reliability Organizations

Pillay

Tuck

Klockner

2019

Advances in Human Error, Reliability, Resilience, and Performance

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Theorizing and theory building in the safety sciences: A reflective inquiry

Cited by 8 publications

References 21 publications

Measuring Resilience Engineering: An Integrative Review and Framework for Bench-Marking Organisational Safety

Measuring Resilience Engineering: An Integrative Review and Framework for Bench-Marking Organisational Safety

Measuring Resilience Potentials: A Pilot Program Using the Resilience Assessment Grid

Investigating Collective Mindfulness in Mining: A Prospective Study in High-Reliability Organizations

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