Inside Hazardous Technological Systems

Methodological foundations, challenges and future directions

Kenneth Pettersen Gould, Carl Macrae, Kenneth Pettersen Gould, Carl Macrae

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000407617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Seguridad y salud industriales

This book explores the challenges, opportunities, applications, and implications of applying qualitative research to critical questions of research and practice in the field of organizational risk and safety.

The book brings together a diverse perspective to explore the practice of conducting qualitative research as well as to debate the quality of research and knowledge, drawing on a range of different perspectives and traditions. It offers novel and innovative developments in data collection and data analysis methods and tools that can be applied to safety, risk, and accident analysis in complex systems. It also will present practical issues associated with data access and empirical research in challenging and high-stakes environments.

This book will provide academics, researchers, students, and professionals in the fields of safety, accident analysis, and risk with a broad-range and expert guide to the key issues and debates in the field, as well as a set of exemplary cases and reflective narratives from leading researchers in the field.

1 Hazardous Technological Systems from the Inside Out

An Introduction

Kenneth Pettersen Gould and Carl Macrae

Contents

Technologically Situated Studies of Risk and Safety

Inside Systems and Inside Research: Objectives, Perspectives and Commitments

Where Have We Come From? A Brief History of the Organisational Field

The Shape of This Book: Practices, Methods, Theory

Where Are We Going? Sketching an Agenda for the Future

References

Technologically Situated Studies of Risk and Safety

Some of the most pressing problems facing modern societies in the twenty-first century involve understanding and controlling the risks posed by the hazardous technological systems that our societies create and depend upon. From the safety of our hospitals and transportation networks to the reliability of our utility services and the security of our financial institutions, complex technological systems underpin every aspect of our lives – and when these systems break down they can have devastating consequences for our social, economic and environmental worlds. Understanding hazardous technological systems is critical both for those who design, regulate and work in those systems and for those who study them. But understanding these systems is difficult. As technological systems have become more complex, widespread and interconnected, they have also become more inscrutable and harder to comprehend – and their failures more surprising. These difficulties are likely to become even more pronounced in the coming decades as opaque cognitive technologies, such as autonomous vehicles and medical artificial intelligence, become ubiquitous. Understanding the risks posed by hazardous technological systems and developing appropriate preventive and precautionary strategies therefore increasingly depends on developing a granular and sensitive understanding of the processes and mechanics that explain how these systems work – and why they fail. This, in turn, requires a sophisticated appreciation of the social dynamics, cultural patterns and organisational practices through which complex technological systems are built and enacted in specific contexts. New forms of cooperation and domains of operations are also developing due to the widespread growth in sophisticated information and communication technologies and an increasing emphasis on security threats and associated security risk reduction measures, leading to an intersection between safety and security management in hazardous industries (Bieder and Gould 2020). In short, the challenge – both in research and in practice – is to “get inside” hazardous technological systems: to understand them from the inside out.

This book is about the methods, practices and strategies that help researchers develop knowledge about hazardous technological systems, and the challenges that are faced in the process. By “technological system” we mean the combined technical, cultural and organisational activities that are brought together to achieve some productive goal, such as the operation of an international airline network (Hughes 1994; Leonardi and Barley 2010). This encompasses the broad array of sociotechnical systems comprising people, material objects, management techniques, cultural norms and shared practices that are engaged in the development, assessment and use of technological objects and processes. In the safety sciences, there is a long tradition of developing close accounts of hazardous technological systems that seek to explain what goes on in those systems by theorising the social and technical interactions through which risk and safety emerge. Some of these theoretical accounts have become touchstone works that have helped to shape entire fields and decades of further research. From Barry Turner’s (1978) groundbreaking analyses of the social incubation of organisational disasters to the revisionist history of Diane Vaughan’s (1997) definitive account of the Challenger shuttle explosion, and from the original Berkeley studies of the social and organisational patterns underpinning high-reliability organisations (La Porte, 1982; La Porte 1996) to the new wave of work that theorises reliability-seeking practices (Roe and Schulman 2008; Schulman and Roe, 2016; Macrae, 2014), our knowledge of hazardous technological systems has been deeply shaped by research that combines rigorous analytical methods with careful empirical exploration of the social worlds that are enmeshed in technological systems. What is more, many of the concepts that have been developed and deployed in these technologically situated studies have become familiar parlance in the hard-nosed world of practical management. Ideas like accident incubation, the normalisation of deviance, latent factors, practical drift, sensemaking – and, indeed, the very notion of safety culture itself – have made the journey from the realms of social science to the sharp-end of management practice.

In-depth, up-close research that seeks to explain what happens in hazardous systems has produced a wealth of insights of both theoretical and practical value, but the methodologies associated with these modes of research are not often considered in similar depth. These methodologies are typically qualitative, theory-generative and founded on constructivist perspectives of sociotechnical systems that emphasise social, interactive and contextual contributions to risk and safety. Explorations of context, social dynamics and organisational practice appear in relatively fragmented and isolated ways across the literature (Gould 2020), which can hamper efforts to build cumulative knowledge and form more integrated methodological approaches, in contrast to other areas of the field such as psychometrics or technical risk analysis. This represents an important methodological gap with tangible consequences. There has also been a tendency in the safety sciences to emphasise conceptual novelty and theoretical interest over more foundational concerns of methodological coherence and empirical rigour (Le Coze et al. 2014). This, in turn, can remove opportunities to evaluate the utility and explore the interrelation of different methods, approaches and epistemologies (see Schulman, Chapter 10, this volume), which can limit the power of our methodological tool kits. And it means that research activities, methodological principles and the theoretical perspectives and epistemological assumptions that underlie them – which represent the social identities, situated practices and cultural norms of knowledge production – are not always fully accounted for or properly explained. Our theories of organisations and hazardous systems as well as our risk assessments rest on epistemological and methodological foundations that are indeterminate (Wynne 1992) and sometimes hidden from view.

This volume aims to help rebalance this situation by bringing attention back onto the methodological foundations of research that seeks to explain what goes on in hazardous technological systems. The intent is to provide a compendium and a companion that researchers, students and more methodologically minded practitioners can use to explore some of the broader methodological landscape of the safety sciences and to better understand the history, diversity, challenges and opportunities that are associated with the more organisationally and socially oriented research approaches and methods that underpin this field. And, while this is not a textbook or a handbook, the aim is that the book offers insights into some of the pragmatic tactics and practical wisdom that can help to get access to hazardous technological systems and explain them from the inside out. This book is therefore concerned both with lifting the lid on hazardous technological systems and with the methodological strategies and practical activities that help us to do that. It aims to take us inside the methodological practices that can, in turn, take us inside technological practices in hazardous domains.

Inside Systems and Inside Research: Objectives, Perspectives and Commitments

What does it mean to do research “inside” hazardous technological systems? This book explores a meaning that is threefold. First, it represents an objective: a core aim to understand the inner workings and social processes that unfold within and around hazardous technological systems. This, in turn, implies practical aims of getting access to these systems and the people that work within them to gather data and develop insight into the way organisational life unfolds in these technological systems – both as they function and as they fail. Second, it represents a perspective: a foundational view that risk, safety and hazardous systems are constructed through and emerge from the interactions and practices of people and technologies within particular organisational contexts and social structures. Such a perspective emphasises the importance of researching and analysing the situated practices, technical objects, organisational processes and cultural characteristics that shape hazardous systems over time. And third, it represents a set of methodological commitments that enact these objectives and this perspective. These include conducting research, as far as possible, “in close” to examine hazardous systems and practices as they have developed and unfold; seeking to understand systems in terms of those who work in and around them by allowing participants to define the contexts and practices of importance and avoiding the imposition of theories and concepts by researchers; and engaging with rich and textured empirical data that typically focuses on the detailed study of a small group of research sites, rather than abstracted analysis of large numbers of cases (Weick 1995). These methodological commitments are typically – though not exclusively – associated with epistemological assumptions that tend towards one or other flavour of constructionism, broadly premised on an acceptance that “research is concerned neither with the production of fantasies about the world, nor with mere mechanical fact-gathering. In social inquiry, there is an interaction between the researcher and the world” (Turner 1981, p. 227).

This book is concerned with research that gives us a view inside hazardous systems, and our intent with this collection is to bring together chapters that themselves offer an exploration inside those research methods and practices. Such “inside” accounts are intended to provide insight into the actual practical work of risk and safety research, exploring tactics, challenges and solutions based on the researchers’ relationships with the research process itself. Collections of inside accounts are not new in social research (Hammond 1964; Habenstein 1970; Bell and Roberts 1984), risk analysis (Krimsky and Golding 1992) or in organisation and work studies (Bryman 1988; Cefkin 2010; Ybema et al. 2009). But, despite the increasing importance of social and organisational research in the safety sciences, methodological reflexivity remains relatively under-developed in this field. Some of the more notable and important contributions include sensitive considerations of the role of grounded theory in relation to risk and safety studies and the importance of analytical expertise (Pidgeon et al. 1991) – the use of which was pioneered by a founding father of the field, Barry Turner (1978). Processes of analogical theorising and other analytical practices have been explored by Vaughan (1999, 2004, 2006), particularly considering the often invisible work of building explanations from data. Action research has been explored as an important orientation for researching and engaging with real-world practices of organisational risk management (Horlick-Jones and Rosenhead 2002). The influence of different methodological choices and research strategies on explanations of organisational culture and safety have begun to be explored (Hopkins 2006), along with the empirical and theoretical consequences of underlying research assumptions that privilege abstract cultural characteristics and consider these in isolation from the practical work that goes on in different organisational contexts (Reiman and Odewald 2006). And, reflecting on his experiences with fellow high-reliability researcher Todd LaPorte, Gene Rochlin (2011) examined the relationship between their fieldwork and other ethnographic means of sociological research, and the particular challenges of being present in hazardous field sites where participation is deeply circumscribed. Despite the rather limited number of published explorations into social and organisational methodologies in the safety sciences, the broader field of risk and safety science nonetheless has a rich and extensive history of social and organisational analysis. This history is both explored by and frames many of the chapters in this collection. In turn, understanding where the field has “come from” helps to explain current challenges and future directions.

Where Have We Come From? A Brief History of the Organisational Field

Four decades ago, Barry Turner published Man-Made Disasters (1978), an innovative and multi-layered analysis of the social and organisational processes underlying disasters. A posthumous second edition co-authored with Nick Pidgeon appeared 20 years later (Turner and Pidgeon 1997). Man-Made Disasters, and its two anniversaries, provided a historical inspiration for this collection and in many ways represented the birth of a new arena within the safety sciences. Many within the risk and safety research communities relate Turner’s work to “disaster incubation,” his theory of the gradual accumulation and progression of disaster-provoking conditions in complex organisational settings (Turner 1978, Turner and Pi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Editors
• Contributor Biographies
• Chapter 1 Hazardous Technological Systems from the Inside Out: An Introduction
• Chapter 2 Turner and the Sociology of Disasters
• Chapter 3 Access, Methods and Knowledge When Exploring High-Hazard Systems: Lessons from the Past for the Future
• Chapter 4 In the Footsteps of Turner: From Grounded Theory to Conceptual Ethnography in Safety
• Chapter 5 Case Studies in Safety Research
• Chapter 6 Actor Network Theory and Sensework in Safety Research
• Chapter 7 Learning to Do Ethnography in Complex Systems
• Chapter 8 Work as Planned, as Done and as Desired: A Framework for Exploring Everyday Safety-Critical Practice
• Chapter 9 Combining Lenses: Pragmatics and Action Research in Safety Science
• Chapter 10 Bridging an Unsafe Divide: In Search of Integrated Safety Science Research
• Chapter 11 Large-Scale Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Safety Programmes and Interventions
• Chapter 12 Putting Senior Management in Focus: A Critical Reflection on the Direction of Safety Science Research
• Chapter 13 Politics, Accident Research and Analysis: The Evolution of Investigation Methods and Practices in Healthcare
• Chapter 14 Exploring the Grey Area of Cyber Security in Industrial Control Systems (ICS): A Qualitative Research Matter
• Afterword: : Connoisseurship, the Sociological Imagination and Turner’s Qualitative Method
• Bibliography
• Index