The Organizational Learning of Safety in Communities of Practice

Abstract

n the past 10 years or so, the issues of safetyand reliability in organizations have beenmoving to the center of scientific and manage-rial interest, not only because of their public impor-tance, but also because of the increasing emphasisplaced on making firms responsible for protecting thehealth of workers and the environment. On one hand,the scientific debate stresses that ours is a risk society(Beck, 1992); on the other, that human and organiza-tional factors are at the origin of industrial disasters(Gephart & Pitter, 1993; Perrow, 1984; Sagan, 1993;Turner & Pidgeon, 1997). In organization studies, thishas given rise to a new area of inquiry that, followingsuch major industrial disasters as Seveso, Three MilesIsland,Challenger,andExxonValdez,investigatesthefactors and conditions that determine the reliabilityand safety of organizations both internally and vis-a-vis their socioenvironmental context. “From risk tosafety” might be the distinctive slogan of the culturalmovement now underway: from the study of risk asan objective factor inherent in risk conditions, to thesocial production of safety conditions sustained by acultureofsafety(Gherardi,Nicolini,&Odella,1997a).Traditional approaches to safety, as regards to bothindustrial disasters and workplace accidents, con-sider it to be a property of technical systems that is ob-jectified in “safe” technologies and artifacts. We maycall this the “technical route to safety.” This is sup-ported by the normative route that views safety as theoutcome of the application of rules and regulationsthat prescribe “safe” individual and collective behav-iors. Although one should certainly not underesti-matetheimportanceofsafety-embodyingtechnologi-cal artifacts, or of the social and organizationalproduction of norms that impose safe working condi-tions, technological and bureaucratic safety cultures

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