Integrating Organizational and Management Variables in the Analysis of Safety and Risk

Abstract

For decades, despite research and description of modern large-scale technologies as �socio-technical systems�, there has been little headway made in integrating research on both the socio and technical aspects of these systems. Social scientists and engineers continue to have contrasting and often non-intersecting approaches to the analysis of organizational factors and the physical aspects of technologies. This essay argues that an important part of this problem has been the ambiguous and underspecified character of the social science research concepts applied to the analysis of organization and management factors. It suggests an important opportunity to more closely integrate social science research into the understanding of hazardous technologies as socio-technical systems through a strategy of clarifying concepts and definitions (such as �safety�) that allow transforming qualitative organizational and managerial �factors� into variables to create metrics useful in the evaluation of safety management systems. It argues also that practitioners have an important role to play in this process. A final argument addresses the contribution that safety metrics could make to the development of higher resolution safety management across a wider spectrum of scales and time-frames than those currently considered by managers and designers of socio-technical systems.