"This book describes research on safety-related decision-making by operations supervisory personnel in three different high-hazard industries, and features a case study illustrating each: a chemical ...plant, a nuclear power station and an air-navigation service provider. The focus of this research is unique: those who supervise the frontline personnel and essentially provide the organizational link between senior management and minute-by-minute system operations"--Provided by publisher.
Contracting and Safety Hayes, Jan; Tillement, Stéphanie
IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc,
2022, 20220101
eBook, Paper
Open access
This open access book examines the increase in outsourcing, contracting and subcontracting as ways of organising work. It explores the impact of these employment arrangements on public safety, ...particularly when they are linked to complex supply networks in a range of engineering industries including oil and gas, nuclear power and aviation. The brief provides practical recommendations on how best to manage arrangements that target short-term profitability and also maintain excellence in long-term safety outcomes. The brief is a source of advice for organisations on how to maximise the benefits and minimise long-term system reliability issues that can be introduced by contracting and outsourcing, rather than assuming it to be a wholly negative or positive practice. Contracting and Safety comprises qualitative, empirical studies focusing on high-reliability organisation. As such, this brief provides a rich picture of the experience of working in complex supply chains. It will be of interest to researchers in industrial safety, as well as safety professionals and project managers within engineering industries.
► The Montara blowout occurred in Australian waters 8
months before Deepwater Horizon. ► The operating company demonstrated a lack of capacity and competence. ► Key organisational causes are ...reviewed. ► Legislation should require direct consideration of organisational competence.
The blowout of the Montara H1 well in the Timor Sea off the northwest coast of Australia in August 2009 was the first such incident in Australian offshore waters for 25
years. This article seeks to draw lessons for management of complex hazardous activities from these events by analysing critical decisions regarding well control barriers. Concepts such as trial and error learning, sensemaking and the need for multiple barriers are used to demonstrate why the organisation was blind to the developing problems and hence why lack of technical competence alone is not sufficient to explain the events that occurred. Three organisational improvements are proposed – providing active supervision, improved technical integrity assurance and better use of risk assessment. The article concludes with an appeal for changes in regulatory policy regarding safety to include organisational issues in addition to the traditional technical focus.
This paper examines the relationship between conceptual and embodied reasoning in engineering work. In the last decade across multiple research projects on pipeline engineering, we have observed only ...a few times when engineers have expressed embodied or sensory aspects of their practice, as if the activity itself is disembodied. Yet, they also often speak about the importance of field experience. In this paper, we look at engineers’ accounts of the value of field experience showing how it works on their sense of what the technology that they are designing looks, feels, and sounds like in practice, and so what this means for construction and operation, and the management of risk. We show how office-based pipeline engineering work is an exercise in embodied imagination that humanizes the socio-technical system as it manifests in the technical artifacts that they work with. Engineers take the role of the other to reason through the practicability of their designs and risk acceptability.
While the literature on regulatory compliance is extensive, little scholarly attention has focused on how companies respond to conflicting regulatory requirements. As a case in point, gas pipelines ...and networks—deemed monopolies—are subject to economic regulation to emulate the price pressures of competition and encourage “efficient” expenditure. Technical (safety) regulation of the same infrastructure also addresses an expenditure trade‐off with safety, potentially drawing different conclusions as to the most appropriate balance. This article reports on a study—drawing on 49 interviews, document review and case studies—analyzing if these two regulatory regimes, as enacted in Australia, are in conflict. We find a significant tension between the two regimes, exhibited through the impact that economic regulation has on a company's planned safety‐related expenditure and thus, long‐term public safety outcomes may be at risk. Australian safety regulation is performance‐based, requiring “reasonably practicable” measures are in place to minimize risk to the public. The San Bruno California disaster, in which eight people died as a result of failed gas infrastructure in the US, shows that such regulatory conflicts also exist in jurisdictions that have adopted prescriptive forms of safety regulation.
•Qualitative study of design safety in the process industries.•Contrasts short term project goals with long term safety requirements.•Discipline engineers and project managers have differing ...professional values.•Highlights safety imagination required to address the long term.
Inquiries into the causes of man-made disasters have shown repeatedly that ongoing safety of workers and the public depends on decisions made, often many years earlier, during the design stage of infrastructure or facility development. The potential for disaster represented by incompatibilities that remain undiscovered between design choices and future operating requirements is a classic example of what Turner calls ‘disaster incubation’ – where beliefs about control of hazards are at odds with actual events.
This research investigates the motivations and attitudes of people working in a design office environment who determine the form of hazardous facilities such as oil refineries, petrochemical plants and pipelines. It explores particularly the issue of responsibility for public safety. This long-term goal faces serious competition for attention from short-term project priorities of integrity, cost and schedule. Linking requirements for public safety to facility integrity (as is often done in a project environment) is shown to have substantial limitations as a strategy for ensuring the best long term outcomes. As a counter to this, some senior discipline engineers were found to emphasise the real-world potential consequences of their work through use of stories and saw communication of professional values to younger staff as a key aspect of their work. The paper also touches on the perceived role of engineering standards and shows that safety design is seen to go beyond simply compliance.
There has been little social science research in this important area. The paper concludes with areas in which further work would be valuable.
•Study of cross sector case based learning based on the Überlingen disaster.•Practitioners in one sector draw lessons from a case in another.•Cases does not need to be mediated by prepared analyses ...of abstract causes.•Engaging directly with the accident narrative is sufficient.
Organizational safety researchers generally agree that, due to the common organizational causes of disasters, lessons can be broadly applicable rather than industry specific. However, previous research has not empirically investigated the ways in which practitioners in one sector apply disaster lessons from another. This article contributes to this scholarship by presenting findings from a project that investigated how gas pipeline engineers engaged with the Überlingen disaster in the aviation industry. Forty-three engineers attended facilitated workshops, involving a summary of the Überlingen disaster from a video, followed by extensive small group discussion. As they worked through the events at Überlingen, participants readily drew connections to their own sector, both as a way to make sense of the disaster case and to think about its implications for their work. They also linked the Überlingen case to their own experience via safety principles and other disaster cases. The lessons they drew are consistent with aviation expert analysis. However, participants focused on lessons relevant to their professional practice, rather than addressing all causal factors showing that learning from cases does not need to be mediated by prepared analyses of abstract causes. Engaging directly with the accident narrative is sufficient.
This open access book examines the increase in outsourcing, contracting and subcontracting as ways of organising work. It explores the impact of these employment arrangements on public safety, ...particularly when they are linked to complex supply networks in a range of engineering industries including oil and gas, nuclear power and aviation.The brief provides practical recommendations on how best to manage arrangements that target short-term profitability and also maintain excellence in long-term safety outcomes. The brief is a source of advice for organisations on how to maximise the benefits and minimise long-term system reliability issues that can be introduced by contracting and outsourcing, rather than assuming it to be a wholly negative or positive practice.Contracting and Safety comprises qualitative, empirical studies focusing on high-reliability organisation. As such, this brief provides a rich picture of the experience of working in complex supply chains. It will be of interest to researchers in industrial safety, as well as safety professionals and project managers within engineering industries.
•Potentially adverse worker and public safety outcomes due to sub-contracting chains.•Qualitative interview data using high pressure gas pipelines as a case study.•Workers increasingly responsible ...for costs linked to their safety and in this case public safety.•‘Tick and flick’ compliance a form of ‘disorganization’ that detracts from safe work behavior.
Organizational responses to financial crises have contributed to workplace changes, including a reliance on multi-tier sub-contracting chains. An extensive research literature discusses the adverse impact of these trends on worker health and safety. Research has shown that economic pressures leading to unsafe practices by contractors, hazardous forms of disorganization in contracting chains and regulatory failure contribute to adverse health and safety outcomes for workers. Less research has addressed the impact of sub-contracting chains on the potential for complex catastrophic incidents in which the public could be impacted. We contribute to a growing body of work on this subject by examining excavation work around high pressure natural gas pipelines in Australia. We draw on past research complemented with concepts from the economics literature to highlight the impact of ‘risk shifting’ as contractors seek to cope with financial pressure in highly competitive sectors. Contract terms incentivize contractors to work as quickly as possible while also prioritizing compliance with safety-related rules. Using qualitative data from 36 face-to-face interviews we discuss the way that supply chains characterized by these types of contracts can lead to situations where the pressure to work quickly means that contractors might trade off safe work practices in order to meet project deadlines and make a profit. We argue that in times of acute financial pressure, safety can become fungible with an associated increase in risk to the public. The findings of this research may have broader implications for other public risk situations in sectors with similar structures and organizational arrangements.
This paper examines the dynamics of expert collaboration in industry standard development. The use of expert committees in the development of standards is common practice, and yet the operation of ...such groups tends to be a “black box.” Based on participant observation and interviews with committee participants, we examine the group dynamics within the subcommittee involved in a major update to one part of the Australian Standard for pipeline engineering, and the skills required of the Chair to obtain the best outcome. We address how the expert group is built, how the Chair leads them to a negotiated outcome, and how the Standard becomes socialized into the public domain. Agreement comes slowly, with some picking their battles, but many others repeatedly putting forward their views. The Chair exhibits three types of expertise (contributory, interactional, decision-making) which together are critical to resolving debates and, in effect, agreeing on the collective wisdom of the group.
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