The Organizational Learning of Safety in Communities of Practice

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

[1]  J. Porac,et al.  Cognition and Communication at Work , 1999 .

[2]  David L. Collinson,et al.  `Surviving the Rigs': Safety and Surveillance on North Sea Oil Installations , 1999 .

[3]  S. Gherardi.  Learning as Problem-Driven or Learning in the Face of Mystery? , 1999 .

[4]  Davide Nicolini,et al.  What Do You Mean By Safety? Conflicting Perspectives on Accident Causation and Safety Management in a Construction Firm , 1998 .

[5]  Davide Nicolini,et al.  Toward a Social Understanding of How People Learn in Organizations , 1998 .

[6]  M. Easterby-Smith,et al.  Organizational Learning: Diverging Communities of Practice? , 1998 .

[7]  Silvia Gheradi.  A Cultural Approach to Disasters , 1998 .

[8]  E. Wenger.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[9]  Dal rischio alla sicurezza: il contributo sociologico alla costruzione di organizzazioni affidabili , 1997 .

[10]  Simon Reynolds,et al.  Learning from Disasters: A Management Approach , 1997 .

[11]  H. Tsoukas.  The firm as a distributed knowledge system : A constructionist approach , 1996 .

[12]  S. L. Star,et al.  Working together: Symbolic interactionism, activity theory, and information systems , 1996 .

[13]  Barbara Czarniawska,et al.  Travels of ideas. , 1996 .

[14]  David Middleton,et al.  Cognition and communication at work: Introduction: Studying work as mindful practice , 1996 .

[15]  Martin B. Meznar,et al.  The Social Construction of Organizational Learning: Conceptual and Practical Issues in the Field , 1995 .

[16]  B. Marchi,et al.  The crisis of scientific expertise in fin de siècle Europe , 1995 .

[17]  B. Turner.  Man Made Disasters , 1995 .

[18]  S. D. N. Cook,et al.  Culture and Organizational Learning , 1993 .

[19]  R. Gephart,et al.  The Organizational Basis of Industrial Accidents in Canada , 1993 .

[20]  K. Weick,et al.  Collective mind in organizations: Heedful interrelating on flight decks. , 1993 .

[21]  John Law,et al.  Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity , 1992 .

[22]  R. Nelson.  Why do firms differ, and how does it matter? , 1991 .

[23]  N. Pidgeon.  Safety Culture and Risk Management in Organizations , 1991 .

[24]  K. Weick.  The Nontraditional Quality of Organizational Learning , 1991 .

[25]  J. Brown,et al.  Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation , 1991 .

[26]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[27]  M. Callon.  Techno-economic Networks and Irreversibility , 1990 .

[28]  Karlene H. Roberts,et al.  New challenges in organizational research: high reliability organizations , 1989 .

[29]  Carol A. Heimer.  Social Structure, Psychology, and the Estimation of Risk , 1988 .

[30]  M. Douglas.  Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences , 1986 .

[31]  D. L. Simms,et al.  Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies , 1986 .

[32]  J. Short.  The Social Fabric at Risk: Toward the Social Transformation of Risk Analysis , 1984 .

[33]  M. Douglas,et al.  Risk and Culture , 1983 .