Working to rule or working safely? Part 2: The management of safety rules and procedures

Abstract

Part 1, the companion paper to this paper (Hale & Borys 2012, this issue) reviews the literature from 1986 on the management of those safety rules and procedures which relate to the workplace level in organisations. It contrasts two different paradigms of how work rules and their development and use are perceived and managed. The first is a top-down classical, rational approach in which rules are seen as static, comprehensive limits of freedom of choice, imposed on operators at the sharp end and violations are seen as negative behaviour to be suppressed. The second is a bottom-up constructivist view of rules as dynamic, local, situated constructions of operators as experts, where competence is seen to a great extent as the ability to adapt rules to the diversity of reality. That paper explores the research underlying and illustrating these two paradigms. In this second paper we draw on that literature study to propose a framework of rule management which attempts to draw the lessons from both paradigms. It places the monitoring and adaptation of rules central to its management process and emphasises the need for participation of the intended rule followers in the processes of rule-making, but more importantly in keeping those rules alive and up to date in a process of regular and explicit dialogue with first-line supervision, and through them with the technical, safety and legal experts on the system functioning. The framework is proposed for testing in the field as a benchmark for good practice.

Researcher Safety? Ethnography in the Interdisciplinary World of Audit Cultures

“…Yet they often do so through ethnographic reflexivity rather than in relation to OSH (e.g., Moreno, 1995). More recently, a growing literature across anthropology (e.g., Samimian-Darash and Rabinow, 2015), human geography (e.g., Adey and Anderson, 2011;Anderson, 2010), and safety research (e.g., Hale and Borys, 2013;Powell at al., 2014) has begun to engage critically with conceptual categories and empirical realities of ÒanticipationÓ, ÒriskÓ, and ÒuncertaintyÓ. Such literatures provide an invigorating critical context through which to engage with questions of researcher OSH.…”

Potential Explosive Device on a Commuter Train: What Drives Train Drivers to Deviate from the Security Procedure?

“…However, the workers may view the rules as inconvenient administrative tasks that take time away from achieving the real work and generate their own heuristics to manage uncertainty in the work process [49,50]. This study was an effort to understand strategies adopted by train drivers to manage a security risk while performing their primary duty of providing safe, on time, and comfortable travel to their passengers.…”

An agent-based model to study compliance with safety regulations at an airline ground service organization

“…The results suggest that facilitating and stimulating feedback from the platform to the rule formation process by management would contribute positively to the autonomy need. Some researchers consider this process as a bottom-up formation of rule ownership by employees [11,12] …”