2. A Practice-Based Approach to Safety as an Emergent Competence

The invitation from FonCSI¹ to reflect on professionalization and safety beyond traditional approaches requires a preliminary explication on how the three terms are understood, before addressing my main reflection on their relationship.

The meaning of safety may be constructed in different ways according to the disciplinary background of the researcher and the approach he or she develops. Thus safety may be thought of and represented as a multifaceted phenomenon that enables a pluralistic way of inquiry. Moreover, the understanding of the field of safety should be considered in historical terms, since it is in itself a socio-cultural product of specific societies. For this reason, we have seen that from the study of risk (in objectivist terms), the field moved on to the culture of safety as an organizational dimension, to reliability and resilience as situated practices. In fact, we may say that the study of safety is part of a reflexive science, since the knowledge produced is going to change the object of study and the changed object calls for a renewed way of studying it.

For approaching safety through the lens of a cultural, organizational and practice-based definition, I offer the following formulation:

Safety is an emergent competence which is realized in practice, which is socially constructed, innovated and transmitted to new members of the community of practices, and which is embedded in values, norms and social institutions. It is the final outcome of a collective construction process, a ‘doing’ which involves people, technologies and textual and symbolic forms assembled within a system of social relations. In other words, a ‘safe’ workplace—a ‘safe’ organization—results from the constant engineering of diverse elements (for example, skills, materials, relations, communications) which are integral to the working practices of the members of an organization. Safety, then, is knowledge objectified and codified in an expertise and circulating within a web of practices. In order to exist it must be performed in, by and through safety practices, i.e. through discursive and material social accomplishments (Gherardi 2006: 71).

When we look at safety through the practice lens we see that:

This ‘lens’ has implications for research since it requires researchers to study safety by studying situated working practices and how practitioners achieve or fail to achieve safe working practices. In other words, safety has to be understood and explained in context and not treated as decontextualized knowledge that may be transferred from one site to another. At the same time this kind of ethnographic, fine-grained understanding of how safety is achieved in situated working practices constitutes a challenge to theorizing safety across different settings. It is important to stress that in implementing safety projects we need a local, contextual and detailed knowledge of how a community of practitioners perform more or less safe working practices, since the focus on safety, as actually done while working, raises the importance of situational improvisation, experience and tacit knowledge as sources of resilience (Johansen et al. 2016).

In proposing a practice lens for looking at safety, we are enlarging the traditional way of looking at safety mainly in relation to prevention and control of processes (or products) related to risk in hazardous activities. When we consider safety as ‘knowing-in-practice’, we are looking at a kind of knowledge that is pervasive and referring to reliability rather than being limited to risk-related contexts. Any activity should in principle be reliable in its outputs and social effects, especially if we consider that risks are pervasive and prone to happen as a consequence of the growing interdependencies of our ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992).

FonCSI proposes a large definition of the term ‘professionalization’ to encompass all kinds of learning and training situations, not limited to traditional classroom training or specific safety-related training. We consider that one of the reasons for this call for papers is dissatisfaction with the delivery of traditional safety knowledge and therefore an implicit issue that needs to be addressed is how this may be imagined and delivered differently. Consequently, I propose to look at professionalization distinguishing three lines of inquiry:

Due to space constraints, I shall focus only on the second understanding, at the level of the workplace, leaving aside the other interconnections.

A final consideration for clarifying the positioning of my contribution is what kind of safety training is envisaged when the discourse on dissatisfaction with ‘traditional’ training is commonly addressed. The training that falls under this category may be considered to be inspired by a bureaucratic logic, aiming to answer to norms of accountability rather than efficacy. Moreover, often training is organized and delivered in an ‘ad hoc context’, usually in a class and with class modalities and often in multiprofessional contexts to unrelated professional groups. Finally, when we look at the implicit pedagogy of similar training we find that the contents of what is depicted as safety are formed by regulations and laws in the implicit understanding that knowing the regulations will produce different (safer) behaviours.

Workplace safety is a particular form of ‘organizational competence’. In other words, it is a form of emerging competence sustained in working practices by interactions among various collective actors (Gherardi and Nicolini 2000),² and various discourses on what constitutes safety.

What we call ‘safety’ is the result of a set of working practices shaped by a system of symbols and meanings which orient action but which consist of something more. Safety can therefore be viewed as an emerging property of a sociotechnical system, the final result of a collective process of construction, a ‘doing’ which involves people, technologies and textual and symbolic forms assembled within a system of material relations. This system of relations is made up of heterogeneous components, and it does not display the traditional distinctions between human and non-human elements, cultural or natural aspects, action and constraints. Rather, all these elements are involved in a constant process of generation called the “engineering of heterogeneity” (Law 1992). A ‘safe’ workplace or a ‘safe’ organization are the outcome of the quotidian engineering of heterogeneous elements—competences, materials, relations, communications, people—integral to the work practices.

When we consider safety as a social and collective accomplishment, as something that is done with the collaboration of all the practitioners involved in a working practice, then we can say that it has the following characteristics:

In summing up, we may say that the engineering of heterogeneous elements involves an effort to integrate modes of action proper to several working practices in the organization and sustained by members who, in that they are engaged in different practices and in different communities of practice, deal with safety in different ways. ‘Safety knowledge’ therefore takes the form of a ‘cultural’ competence able to influence the style and manner in which meaning and value are attributed to events and to determine the use to which the resources, technologies, artifacts, and knowledge of a group or organization are put. We can say therefore that the knowledge object ‘safety’ is constructed—materially and discursively—by a plurality of professional communities, according to specific scientific disciplines, controlling specific leverages within an organization, and talking different safety discourses.

When we examine the many safety discourses, co-habiting the very same organization and none of which are hegemonic or possessing a superior ‘truth’, we can understand better how workplace safety becomes a contested terrain, which is more often like a ‘dialogue of the deaf’ than an integration of perspectives. The plurality and contemporaneity of safety discourses has consequences for the learning of safety in a constellation of communities of practice. Learning safer working practices is mediated by comparison of the world perspectives embraced by the co-participants in the production of safety as an organizational practice. We shall develop this argument in the following section, since the comparison among perspectives is made possible by the alignment of mental and material elements, within mutually accountable discursive positions (Gherardi and Nicolini 2002). These alignments are provisional and unstable; they produce tensions, discontinuities and incoherence (cacophony) just as much as they produce order and negotiated meanings (consonance).

The term ‘discourse’ is used to denote a set of texts able to give a (relative) stable form to an object or set of objects, together with the structures and practices involved in their production and circulation. Discourses are forms of strategic arranging that are intentional but do not necessarily have a subject (Law 1994: 21; Foucault 1980: 95). Discourses are therefore themselves relational effects and, as such, they are necessarily contingent, no matter how durable and established they may appear. To every discourse there corresponds an entrenched action-net of alliances which facilitate translation and mobilization of knowledge and modes of knowing. In the case of safety, there are competing discourses: technological, normative, educational, economic, and managerial. The first three will be illustrated in the next sub-sections, while the latter two considered to be implicit in the logic of the chapter.

The principles on which to base a pedagogy for training that acknowledges the situatedness of safety knowledge are simple and are consequential to the practice-based approach outlined. In the first instance the object of training and learning has been moved to safe working practices and the recipients of such training become the community of practice that collectively reflect on their working practices and the knowledge embedded in them in order to change or improve their reliability. An implication of such a principle is that training cannot be delivered in a separate time and place, but should consider the workplace as a learning place and address the community of practice dwelling in it. In my experience, the representation of working practices (through video, feed-back restitution etc.) to practitioners may be a useful means to reflect on and change practices.

In the second instance the multimodality around safe working practices has to be acknowledged in order to improve the interpretative flexibility and mutual accountability in practicing and dealing with practical responsibility. One way of understanding the different discourses on safety may be translated as the capacity of participating with competence in a conversation that is characterized by tensions and sometime difficult trade-offs. In other words, the knowledge object ‘safety’ should be learnt during training as an object of concern and not an object of fact. The difference between a matter of fact and a matter of concern (Latour 2004) is that instead of ‘being there’, whether one likes it or not, matters of concern have to be liked, appreciated, tasted, put to the test. Matters of concern are disputable, they move, they carry one away, they matter. Too often safety is approached in a rational way, and persons are conceived as a non-trustable ‘human factor’. On the contrary the simple evidence that persons are concerned by safety and that safety concern persons and society could become the basis for action-learning programs (Eikeland 2012; Eikeland and Nicolini 2011) inspired by care in working practices. Since care cannot be prescribed, nor encoded in some sort of evidence-based manual, the possibility of recognizing what is commonly understood to be care in a work setting, and how an implicit understanding and negotiation of care takes place on a daily basis, may become a starting point for the development of a situated repertoire of caring practices in a workplace. In fact, the idea of what is care (and how people are engaged in ‘doing’ safety) is silently incorporated in working practices. Therefore, for the development of a situated training program in the workplace it should become an explicit topic for discussion and for collective learning. Safety does not speak for itself, often it is ‘done’ but not ‘seen’.

Practice-based studies have experimented with several methodologies—ethnography, reflexivity, narrativity—for enhancing the formative and transformative role of knowledge embedded in working practices (Boud et al. 2006; Fenwick 2003; Hager et al. 2012; Raelin 2001; Scaratti et al. 2009). The necessary condition for this is the collaboration with practitioners working within the organization and “the challenge is thus to devise new ways of making (and considering) people as the authors of their work. The expectation is that this will enable people to shoulder and contribute to the goals of the organizations they belong to” (Gorli et al. 2015). In fact, the collective engagement of researchers and participants in reflexivity (Cunliffe 2003) can help to bring to the surface the knowledge embedded in practicing and transform it into actionable knowledge (Argyris and Schon 1978). Actionable knowledge—for changing practices—emerges when all actors agree to question the issues that are often taken for granted and are ready to address the contradictions and conflicts that might emerge in the process.