Socially constructing safety
Guest-editors: Nick Turner (University of Manitoba) and Garry C. Gray (Institute for Work and Health).
In social scientific research, workplace safety has been widely conceptualized as a disembodied, tangible, and easily quantifiable phenomenon. With a heritage of searching for the elusive “accident-prone” employee, more recent research efforts have focused on exploring organizational conditions that predict workplace safety outcomes, resulting in top-down, often decontextualized prescriptions (e.g., management should build a strong safety culture) about how to control safety in the workplace. With a legacy in critical sociology (with proponents such as Charles Perrow and Theo Nichols), there is growing interest in how social processes of organizing, wider socio-cultural considerations, and the situated social production of safety can contribute to the appreciation of the ‘lived experience’ of life and death at work. This perspective, we suggest, has not only sparked new areas of inquiry but also represents a distinctive shift in viewpoint. This special issue aims to focus on this emerging perspective and seeks papers that focus on the socially constructed nature of safety and the various contested meanings of safety. Drawing on a socially constructed perspective of safety, what theoretical gaps exist in traditional safety-related theoretical frames? How does the study of emotions enhance our understanding of safety? How is safety created during the inspection process? We wish to encourage studies that not only examine the everyday situated nature of workplace safety, but also add to our understanding of how safety is socially constructed. Papers that will be ideal for this special issue will not focus on safety alone, but show ways in which safety is helpful and relevant to understanding broader social and organizational processes.
Given this remit, the guest editors invite manuscripts on a range of topics, some of which may include:
- Social negotiation of safety (e.g., how safety is created during the inspection process, institutional routines for explaining accidents).
- Emotion and safety (e.g., how families in communities that repeatedly face workplace fatalities cope with these events).
- Physical body and the embodiment of safety at work (e.g., the stigma associated with (in)visible workplace injuries).
- Normalization of dangerous work in marginalized populations (e.g., dangers faced by sub-contracted, temporary, and other less visible workers).
- Politics of accounting for safety and/or refusing dangerous work (e.g., the role of surveillance systems in promoting, deflecting, and interpreting safe work practices and statistics).
- Learning and the transfer of knowledge in safety (e.g., the social dynamics of safety culture).
- Folklore, superstition, and rhetoric of safety (e.g., 'talking rocks' in mining contexts and work-related routines that ward off physical harm).
- Safety in newly emerging economies (e.g., the safety implications of imposing Western work practices and systems on local workforces).
- New perspectives on safety-related theoretical frames (e.g., reconciling Normal Accidents Theory and High Reliability Theory).
In line with the interdisciplinary nature of Human Relations, we particularly invite contributions drawing from different disciplines, which may include (but not limited to) communication studies, cultural studies, critical history, folklore, social psychology, socio-legal studies, organizational psychology, sociology, and organizational theory.
Contributors should note the following:
- This call is open and competitive, and the submitted papers will be blind reviewed in the normal way.
- Submitted papers must be based on original material not under consideration by any other journal or outlet.
- The editors will select five papers to be included in the special issue, but other papers submitted in this process may be published in other issues of the journal.
The deadline for submissions is 1st December 2007. The special issue is intended for publication in the second half of 2008/ beginning of 2009.
Manuscripts to be considered for this special issue should be submitted online here. Please direct questions about the submission process, or any administrative matter, to Alice Gilbertson at editorial@humanrelationsjournal.org.
The editors of the special issue are very happy to discuss initial ideas for papers, and can be contacted directly:
Nick Turner
I.H. Asper School of Business
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3T 5V4
e-mail: turnern@cc.umanitoba.ca
Garry C. Gray
Institute for Work & Health
481 University Avenue
Suite 800
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5G 2E9
e-mail: ggray@iwh.on.ca
