Inside Hazardous Technological Systems: Methodological Foundations, Challenges and Future Directions

305 Pages·2021·20.17 MB·English

by  Kenneth Pettersen Gould and Carl Macrae

Inside Hazardous
Technological Systems

Inside Hazardous
Technological Systems
Methodological Foundations,
Challenges and Future Directions
Edited by
Kenneth Pettersen Gould
and Carl Macrae
First edition published 2021
by CRC Press
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Contents
Foreword: Qualitative Inquiries into Safety Research .............................................vii
Silvia Gherardi
Preface....................................................................................................................xiii
Editors .....................................................................................................................xv
Contributor Biographies .........................................................................................xvii
Chapter 1 Hazardous Technological Systems from the Inside Out:
An Introduction ....................................................................................1
Kenneth Pettersen Gould and Carl Macrae
Chapter 2 Turner and the Sociology of Disasters ...............................................19
Andrew Hopkins
Chapter 3 Access, Methods and Knowledge When Exploring High-Hazard
Systems: Lessons from the Past for the Future ..................................33
Mathilde Bourrier
Chapter 4 In the Footsteps of Turner: From Grounded Theory to
Conceptual Ethnography in Safety ....................................................49
Jean-Christophe Le Coze
Chapter 5 Case Studies in Safety Research ........................................................69
Stian Antonsen and Torgeir Kolstø Haavik
Chapter 6 Actor Network Theory and Sensework in Safety Research ...............85
Torgeir Kolstø Haavik
Chapter 7 Learning to Do Ethnography in Complex Systems .........................101
Christian Henrik Alexander Kuran
Chapter 8 Work as Planned, as Done and as Desired: A Framework for
Exploring Everyday Safety-Critical Practice ...................................115
Andrew J. Rae, David E. Weber and Sidney W. A. Dekker
v
vi Contents
Chapter 9 Combining Lenses: Pragmatics and Action Research in Safety
Science ..............................................................................................133
Trond Kongsvik and Petter G. Almklov
Chapter 10 Bridging an Unsafe Divide: In Search of Integrated Safety
Science Research ..............................................................................151
Paul R. Schulman
Chapter 11 Large-Scale Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Safety Programmes
and Interventions ..............................................................................169
Graham Martin, Jane O’Hara and Justin Waring
Chapter 12 Putting Senior Management in Focus: A Critical Reflection on
the Direction of Safety Science Research ........................................187
Jan Hayes and Sarah Maslen
Chapter 13 Politics, Accident Research and Analysis: The Evolution of
Investigation Methods and Practices in Healthcare .........................203
Siri Wiig, Jeffrey Braithwaite and Geir Sverre Braut
Chapter 14 Exploring the Grey Area of Cyber Security in Industrial
Control Systems (ICS): A Qualitative Research Matter ..................221
Alberto Zanutto
Afterword: Connoisseurship, the Sociological Imagination and
Turner’s Qualitative Method ..................................................................................237
Nick Pidgeon
Bibliography ...........................................................................................................249
Index ......................................................................................................................279
Foreword
Qualitative Inquiries into
Safety Research
Silvia Gherardi1
The present collection of chapters organised around the idea of looking inside “haz-
ardous systems” with the lens of qualitative methodologies, offers a distinctive con-
tribution to safety research because it is positioned at the crossroad of two entwined
conversations. On one side the organisational approach to risk and disasters, which
changed the conception of risk in the early 1980s, and on the other side the challenge
of qualitative methodologies for conducting research on safety in the 1990s. Both
conversations are deeply indebted and shaped by the legacy of Barry Turner and
his Man-Made Disaster (MMD) model (Turner, 1978, Turner and Pidgeon, 1997)
that contributed to the development of a type of scientific inquiry which considers
organisational factors in the aetiology of accidentally caused disasters. In reading
this book, we can see the materialisation of an outstanding contribution that, after
more than 40 years, is still able to inspire new ways of doing empirical research and
develop new problematisations of ongoing challenges to safety.
Man-Made Disasters, as a book, a model of analysis and as the symbol of Turner’s
theorisation on safety culture, is a cultural fact in itself because it represents an
inscription in the world of culture. It is also a neologism in the vocabulary of risk
and safety, since “Man-Made Disaster” is a term which denotes a class of phenom-
ena which constitutes a distinct social reality in the flux of experience. With this
term Turner marked out a type of disaster previously undistinguished from natural
disasters. He was the first to conceive of disasters in terms of a process of incubation
and not as “bolts from the blue” (as he loved to say). The man-made disasters model,
both as a descriptive tool and in its later development as a diagnostic and learning
aid (Toft and Turner, 1987, Toft and Reynolds, 1994), is about how technical, social,
institutional and administrative arrangements can produce disasters. It is about the
relationship between information, error and surprise in organisations, “for we know
that responsibility for failure can be just as dispersed and fragmented as responsibil-
ity for success” (Turner, 1978, p. xv). In this quote we may trace the shift that took
place in the 1980s “from technical risk to safety culture” and the direction of such
a shift towards the consideration of the complexity induced by organisational and
cultural factors in doing research and theorising risk and safety.
Turner provided the first item of evidence to show that crises – like those induced
by MMD – may constitute a threat but they also may, from one point of view, be
vii
viii Foreword
considered as opportunities for pursuing social change. Turner (1978, p. 22) recalls
that the two Chinese characters used to express the word “crisis” mean “danger” and
“opportunity” in order to show that crises may be considered as opportunities within
an organisation, or even as a means of aiding personal growth for individual manag-
ers. In fact, Turner at the end of his life when he and Nick Pidgeon were revising
the 1978’s version of MMD, moved to see crisis as an opportunity for organisational
learning, thus exploring how knowledge maybe de-contextualised from the original
situation (crisis) and re-contextualised within organisational procedures as knowl-
edge in use.
The complexity inherent in the cultural and organisational approach to disasters is
that any epistemic practice (any organisational culture) is at the same time “a way of
seeing [that] is always also a way of not seeing” (Turner, 1978, p.49). Organisational
culture – as a way of seeing – can be conceived as embedded in the equipment that
organisations use in operating upon the world, as cultural elements for relating to the
tasks at hand, to the environments in which they are immersed and to the manner in
which those within the organisation interact with each. This is plainly a sociomate-
rial conception of culture which breeds an orientation to action situated in the opera-
tional context and which does not undervalue the material culture inscribed in the
use of equipment and technology. At the same time a culture is a way of not seeing; it
is “a collective blindness to important issues, the danger that some vital factors may
be left outside the bounds of organizational perception” (Turner, 1978, p. 47). This
union of opposites – culture as a tool for seeing and not seeing – takes us to a topic
that Turner resumed later when he proposed a reading of Derrida applied to the use
of software for hazard control (Turner, 1994a). In this light, culture is viewed as spo-
ken language, as a system of marks, whether these are the technology, the computer
software or the semantic networks he was writing about.
In fact, the sociological literature on disasters was enriched in those years by a
further shift away from organisational factors understood in the mainly structural
or sociotechnical sense towards the cultural factors used in interpreting safety prob-
lems (Gephart et al., 1990; Wright, 1994; Pidgeon, 1995; Gherardi, 2004). The main
assumption is that organisations are concerned with intention and the execution of
intention. Disasters always represent a failure of intention, a failure of foresight.
Turner and Pidgeon view a sociological definition of disaster as raising a challenge
against existing cultural assumptions. A disaster was conceived as an “an event,
concentrated in time and space, which threatens a society or a relatively self-suffi-
cient subdivision of a society with major unwanted consequences as a result of the
collapse of precautions which had hitherto been culturally accepted as adequate”
(Turner and Pidgeon, 1997, p. 70). The advantage of this definition is that it covers
instances where the amount of physical damage is not great, but the mishap reveals a
gap in defences which were regarded as secure and a need for cultural readjustment.
Thus, by adopting the MMD model of analysis, we may follow Turner and
Pidgeon by formulating a definition that does not refer to the physical impact or
scale of the event. Instead, in sociological terms, an accident can be defined “as the
overturning and disruption of cultural norms and expectations for dealing with risk
and safety matters” (Turner and Pidgeon, 1997, p. 74). The MMD model suggests
Foreword ix
that “technical, human, managerial and cultural dimensions interact in a contingent
open-ended process that precludes deterministic analysis” (Horlick-Jones, 1996, p.
xx).
In those years the linguistic turn was establishing itself stating that language does
not describe reality but creates it and, therefore, the borders between ontology and
epistemology were blurring. In fact, through language and through epistemological
practices the object of study (be it, safety, risk, disaster) is constructed and conse-
quently we can use the term “onto-epistemology” (Barad, 2007). Thus, a new chal-
lenge is facing qualitative research: how to conduct qualitative research once the
researchers consider themselves and their epistemic practices as part of the research
assemblage?
To the first conceptualisation of disasters in sociotechnical terms we may apply
notions drawn from actor-network theory and see in the disappearance of the hyphen
from “sociotechnical” systems the demise of the distinction between the social and
the technical, the social and the material (as in sociomateriality). In this case, the
boundaries among the material, technical, human, managerial or cultural vanish,
so that an accident can be defined simply as a breakdown or dis-alignment in what
hitherto was a way of ordering heterogeneous materials.
In the duality and ambivalence of language-in-use in organisational context we
can trace a theme that years later became central in Science and Technologies Studies
and was expressed as “multiplicity of objects” (Mol, 2002) or “empirical ontologies”
(Law and Lien, 2013). It is the idea that an object (a definition of risk, or hazard or
safety) is not a single “reality” but may be constructed as multiple “reals” in different
parts of an organisation and in relation to different apparatuses of detection and/or
measurement. This theme was already present in the conception of culture in MMD
but continues to be overlooked. In MMD the ambiguity in language and of language
is a theme inherent to the description of information difficulties in the incubation of
disasters, and the risks that organisations cause through operational management
or maintenance deficiencies. Plurality of interpretations is present, but what is not
stressed is that risk, hazard or safety are multiple and depend on the epistemic prac-
tices that identify them.
I stress the point of view that culture may be formulated as a particular knowledge
structure and value system that has received normative status. The reason for link-
ing culture to knowledge and to knowing is that a cultural approach to safety and
disasters implies the methodological choice of studying culture in socially situated
knowledgeable practices. We find this methodological challenge anytime that safety
is defined in relation to knowledge and to practice and thus when safety is researched
as a collective knowledgeable doing and an emergent social competence (Gherardi,
2006).
What qualitative approaches have in common is in particular that safety, risk and
disasters are studied as social in origin and this epistemological framework induces
us to give attention to what is known, what is not known, who does not know, and
why it is so (Pettersen Gould, 2020).
The contemporary debates that we may read in this book have their roots in the
qualitative social science approaches of the 1980s and 1990s that showed that the