THE SOCIOLOGY OF SAFETY

Engineering is a human enterprise. All technical activities are purposeful and the goals to which they are directed can only be human ones-in general, goals concerning the arrangement and shaping of the material world for our use and convenience. As well as supplying the objectives towards which such engineering activities are steered, human beings also design, construct, operate, maintain and dispose of engineering installations. The success or failure of an engineering project is thus dependent upon the way in which they carry out these crucial tasks. To the sociological eye, engineering systems are always sociotechnical systems, made up of a technical system embedded within a social system.

To understand why an engineering project might fail, on the one hand, or might safely perform to specification, on the other, the recognition that the technical aspects of a project are always intertwined with social and human factors is important. After large-scale accidents, more than two-thirds of the recommendations typically made by public inquiries refer to social and administrative matters: to the need to communicate better, to clarify administrative responsibilities, to improve supervision and monitoring, to search for more satisfactory procedures and to develop anticipatory research. As we shall see below, we cannot predict in detail the form of major engineering failures, but we can expect that after such incidents there will be a strong emphasis upon reviewing and correcting the social as well as the technical aspects of a failed sociotechnical engineering system.

Someone-and it may be the engineer if no one else is willing-has to take care of such social and administrative matters to enable an engineering installation or construction to continue to function satisfactorily. In the absence of such care, engineering projects will repeatedly fail for non-technical rather than for technical reasons. Engineers have a vested interest in seeing that their projects are not subverted by the way in which they are constructed, operated or maintained, and to support this interest they may have to attend to the human factors relevant to a particular project, if only to assure themselves that appropriate administrative personnel and procedures are in place.

Looking more closely at the typical engineering process (Fig. 9.1 ), the sociotechnical systems involved may be separated into three overlapping and interconnected types: in-house systems, installation systems and end-user systems : 1. In-house systems are the organizational, professional and technical settings in which the design engineer or the engineering planner works in order to devise and specify a new engineering system.

Typically the activities in such settings will be concerned with the everyday professional practice of the design engineer. Questions about the clarity of the brief being tackled, the adequacy of the design and environmental information available, the appropriateness of the engineering models and standards being used, the accuracy of design calculations made and the procedures for checking and reviewing the quality of the design process are relevant to this practice. To understand the background of such systems it is important to enquire about matters such as the level and recency of professional training, arrangements for updating such training, the workload, the level of back-up staff and resources and the patterns of communication and organization prevalent in the design offices or engineering practices concerned.