Trapping Safety into Rules

Rules and procedures are key features for a modern organization to function. It is no surprise to see them to be paramount in safety management. As some sociologists argue, routine and rule following is not always socially resented. It can bring people comfort and reduce anxieties of newness and uncertainty. Facing constant unexpected events entails fatigue and exhaustion. There is also no doubt that proceduralization and documented activities have brought progress, avoided recurrent mistakes and allowed for 'best practices' to be adopted. However, it seems that the exclusive and intensive use of procedures today is in fact a threat to new progress in safety. There is an urgent need to consider this issue because there is doubt that the path chosen by many hazardous industries and activities is the most effective, safety wise, considering the safety level achieved today. As soon as safety is involved, there seems to be an irresistible push towards a wider scope of norms, procedures and processes, whatever the context implied. This book is not a plea against proceduralization, but it does take the view that it is time to reassess how far it can still go and to what benefit. Underlying these questions, there is a growing suspicion that the path taken might in fact lead to a dead end, unless the concept of procedure and the conditions under which these procedures are developed are revisited.

Corinne Bieder graduated as an engineer from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (1993). She then completed her education with master degrees in both risk management at the Ecole Centrale Paris (1994) and social sciences in La Sorbonne University (1999). She started her career doing research for Electricité de France on Human Reliability Analysis in the nuclear industry actively participating in the development and deployment of the MERMOS method (1994-2000). She then joined a small consulting company, named Dédale, to work on a variety of human factors and safety projects in a variety of hazardous domains (aviation, energy, railways, hospitals, etc). In 2005 she joined Airbus where she successively held jobs in the training and strategy departments. She is now with the safety department in charge on the corporate safety strategy. Corinne has published a book with Hermès-Lavoisier on human factors in risk management and a number of conference papers on human factors and safety. Mathilde Bourrier holds a PhD in Sociology from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (1996) and an Habilitation (2004). She is Professor of Sociology at the University of Geneva. Mathilde works on the social construction of safety, focusing on the conditions under which organizational reliability can be achieved and sustained. Her research interests address risk and organization theory and organizational anthropology. She has conducted extensive studies at nuclear power plants in France and in the US and has also worked in public hospitals, looking at skills and know-how transmission in Anaesthesiology. Mathilde has published four books: one with the Presses Universitaires de France, on a comparative ethnography of Nuclear Power Plants in France and in the US (1999), the second with L'Harmattan, on Organizing Reliability (2001; 2003); She co-directed a volume for Cambridge University Press with Michael Baram on Governing Risk in Genetically Modified Agriculture (