Learning How Organizations Mitigate Risk

Over time, more and more organizations, whose technical and industrial activities are capable of causing perceptible adverse public effects, feel pressure from their external environment to greatly reduce the incidence of errors or failure. This paper describes the first phase of research designed to extend the HRO findings and approaches to studying organizations that are not yet experiencing similar pressures, but may soon be. Preliminary work supports four hypotheses that were generated by literature on resource dependency which was developed and applied to the marine industry. Future research will extend observations further, ultimately returning to such primary issues of the original research as decision making, culture, adaptation to technology and structure, but applying these issues to a wider variety of cases, outcomes and approaches.