Organisational Complexity and Subcontracting Management: Confronting Lessons from Accidents and from Normal Functioning Safety Assessment

• In Event: The Impact of Outsourcing and Contracting on Accident Prevention in Complex Sociotechnical Systems (2)

Abstract

Lessons of industrial accidents in the seventies and eighties provided the basis for the theorization of organizational failures and later the concept of “organizational accidents”. Further research and later accidents have shown the inter-organizational dimensions of accidents especially with the involvement of subcontractors.
Other research, such as by High Reliability Organisations specialists pointed to the coordination challenges, the interstitial spaces and gaps to fill. In addition, a general trend of massive subcontracting and globalization has raised issues of organizational complexity management and raised doubts on risk management and governance. This debate is also highly controversial with opposition from trade-unions that highlight production pressures and risk transfer to workers' labour conditions.
Aside from the political and societal debate, the issue is rather that safety analysts, managers and regulators should consider factors that are required for safe performance of industrial processes and potential limits of risk management under this organization of work.
In this paper, our goal is to address those influence factors, either positive or negative, with a twofold strategy, with lessons from accidents on one side and lessons from normal functioning safety assessment.
Our analysis will draw on the lessons from accidents, especially on organizational complexity, subcontracting and several normal functioning safety assessments IRSN performed these last 5 years on maintenance outages and subcontracting management that provided foundations for safety regulation.
The discussion will help to analytically confront some key lessons and provide a synthesised view on knowledge gaps and challenges between performance factors and vulnerability patterns.

Authors

• Nicolas Dechy, Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire

• Alexandre Largier, Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire