There is safety in power, or power in safety

Highlights

• Organizational accidents involve politics and power, but safety science lacks a research agenda.

• There is safety in having the organizational power to decide on cause and countermeasures.

• There is power in safety, in how organizational processes toward risk are legitimated.

• Our research must better capture the workings of power in event investigation and safety culture.

Abstract

Power and politics are profoundly implicated in organizational accidents. Yet the safety-scientific literature remains relatively uncommitted to a research agenda that would make power a critical category in our understanding of organizational safety. This has consequences for the field’s scholarship and for safety praxis. This paper reviews how power in the literature has been elided or treated as an instrumental force where views of reality compete for acceptance and dominance. Despite its recent preoccupation with “safety culture,” the literature has only just started embracing power as embodied in discourse or in the legitimated procedures and organizational processes for the production and acceptance of safety. We conclude with suggestions for how such a research agenda might look.

Introduction

This paper considers the role that safety-scientific research has given to power. It is difficult not to consider power in any serious discussion of safety. An increasingly familiar idea in safety science, after all, is that accidents and disasters are organizational or administrative in nature (Pidgeon and O’Leary, 2000, Rasmussen, 1997, Reason, 1997, Turner, 1978). Accidents are increasingly seen as failures of risk control (Beck, 1992, Giddens, 1991, Green, 2003), to the point that one journal concerned with healthcare safety banned the use of “accidents” altogether (Davis and Pless, 2001). Power is of course inherent in the life of risk-managing organizations (Gephart, 1984). It links the organization to regulators and surrounding communities (Rasmussen, 1997) and is heavily involved in the attribution of causes and processes to learn lessons from them afterward (Clarke and Perrow, 1996, Feynman, 1988, Sagan, 1993, Vaughan, 1996, Woods et al., 2010). An examination of the risk management activities by people involved in preventing (or failing to prevent) failure has become a common political, judicial and safety-scientific focus (Alaszewski and Coxon, 2008, Antonsen, 2009, Dekker, 2009, Woods, 1990), in part to ameliorate societal anxieties provoked by accidents and disasters (Beck, 1992, Fressoz, 2007). This has helped legitimize the expansion of governmental and institutional control of risk (Brown, 2000, Byrne, 2002, Clarke and Perrow, 1996, Gephart, 1984, Perrow, 1984). Power, then, is implicated everywhere in safety and organizational failure, and necessitates a “constant awareness that politics pervades organizations that manage hazardous technologies” (Sagan, 1994, p. 238).

But how has safety science dealt with power? How has it constructed the role power plays in the creation and breaking of safety? In part, safety science has not worried much about power at all. “The role of power in organizations is an issue which is rarely addressed” (Antonsen, 2009, p. 183). Pidgeon and O’Leary (2000) concluded that “the influence of such societal variables on the promotion of safety cultures are likely to be powerful, and in some circumstances may even dominate, and yet we know almost nothing about them at present” (p. 27). Eliding power in safety research, says Antonsen, sustains an unrealistically harmonious image of organizational life, one that is homogenous and free from conflict.

To begin to address this gap as one of the challenges to the foundations of our science, we try to do three things in the remainder of this paper. We first consider how safety science has been able to eschew serious consideration of power. Then we review safety literature where power is seen as an instrumental force. With more power, the possessor can do more: s/he can intervene in an ongoing process, call the shots, set organizational direction. According to this literature, there is “safety in power.” It is safe for one’s position, team, patient, process, and so forth, to have power. Emancipatory projects such as crew resource management training in aviation and healthcare, which attempt to redistribute decision power downward, are modeled after this idea. Second, we explore the possibility of a safety research agenda that might turn power into a more social-scientific topic. Rather than power as a possession, this considers power as a process that pervades all aspects of organizational life. In other words, there is power in safety—everywhere in safety.