Trapping Safety into Rules: How Desirable or Avoidable is Proceduralization?

The use of procedures within safety-critical systems has long been a focus of researchers and practitioners working in the areas of safety science and human factors. Whilst there is no doubt that proceduralization has led to performance and safety enhancements in many areas, deficiencies in operating procedures are often implicated in workplace accidents and incidents, including large scale catastrophes such as the Bhopal, Piper Alpha and Clapham junction disasters [1]. More recently, the introduction of new safety-related concepts such as resilience engineering has raised important questions about the nature of, and requirement for, operating procedures within complex sociotechnical systems. The book Trapping Safety into Rules: How Desirable or Avoidable is Proceduralization? represents a timely contribution in which the relationship between procedures and safety management, the current state of affairs with regard to the use of procedures in safety critical systems, the very need for procedures, and the future for proceduralization is discussed in contributions from 27 authors.