Community of Practice: A Workplace Safety Case Study (original) (raw)
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The Organizational Learning of Safety in Communities of Practice
Journal of Management Inquiry, 2000
In the past 10 years or so, the issues of safety and reliability in organizations have been moving to the center of scientific and managerial interest, not only because of their public importance, but also because of the increasing emphasis placed on making firms responsible for protecting the health of workers and the environment. On one hand, the scientific debate stresses that ours is a risk society (Beck, 1992); on the other, that human and organizational factors are at the origin of industrial disasters (Gephart & Pitter, 1993; ...
A practice-based approach to safety as an emergent competence.
This chapter proposes to look at safety as a collective knowledgeable doing, i.e. a competence embedded in working practices. Therefore when we assume a practice-based approach to inquire into how work is actually accomplished, we can study how knowing safe and safer working practices is kept and maintained within situated ways of working and talking about safety. 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 discourses. In a workplace competing discourses face each other: a technological, a normative, an educational, an economic, and a managerial one. Therefore, learning safer working practices is mediated by comparison among the perspectives of the world embraced by the co-participants in the production of safety as an organizational practice. Training and learning based on situated working practices presume the collective engagement of researchers and participants in reflexivity, which can help to bring to the surface the experience knowledge embedded in practicing and transform it into actionable knowledge to produce practice changes. In fact, the engagement of practitioners, their experience knowing and their care for what they do may enhance workplace resilience.
European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology and Education
Background: Workplace injuries in Italy still occur despite laws and safety norms. We need to understand the causes rooted in the context and social conditions, and need to improve the practice of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) inspectors of the Workplace Safety and Prevention Services (WSPS) of the Italian regional health boards. The aims of this study were to describe the setting up of a Community of Practice (CoP) for the production of best practices for injury prevention and to evaluate the motivation of OSH inspectors for participating in the CoP and the effects of CoP participation on their professional practice. Methods: Two workplace injury stories underwent peer review during each CoP meeting. We evaluated the CoP using a focus group and a questionnaire. Result: Between 2014 and 2021, the CoP met in 18 workshops. Over the 8-year period, the CoP grew from 20 to 150 participants. Overall, 30 stories underwent peer review and were published on the institutional website. ...
Training to safety rules use. Some reflections on a case study
This article proposes to consider training in occupational risk prevention as situated at the crossroads between regulated safety (based on prescribed safety rules and procedures)-and managed safety (based on operators' knowledge and experience). A case study in the field of ready-mixed concrete delivery to worksites is presented. It demonstrates the redefinitions of a safety rule within companies, giving it little operational value for operators, and the resources that they have built with experience. These resources are also shown to be limited. Indeed, not everything can be learned through in situ experience and peer mediation. Thus, the " professional knowledge of reference " needs to be identified in order to design training content that combines the "regulated safety" and "managed safety" that are necessary to produce safe working conditions. This approach to training design, based on the analysis of activity in situ, represents a shift away from the technical-regulatory and behavioral approach that still dominates the field of training in occupational risk prevention.