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This opening chapter questions the links between safety and ‘professionalization’ according to the following dialectics. ‘Ordinary safety’, means safety embedded in everyday industrial practices where the more professional one is in one’s dedicated duties, the safer one works. Yet ‘extraordinary safety’, namely safety isolated from other working dimensions, is a matter of exception and safety training requires specific actions from specialized departments and professionals. The author then elaborated on safety to meet internal objectives or safety to comply with external stakeholders’ expectations, more as a justification requirement.

This chapter proposes to look at safety as a collective knowledgeable doing, i.e. a competency embedded in working practices. Therefore, by adopting 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, there are competing discourses: technological, normative, educational, economic, and managerial. 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 presumes 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 knowledge and their care for what they do may enhance workplace resilience.

Constructing rules for work that foster both health and safety and efficient production entails, in many organisations, the introduction of procedures, tools and techniques implemented by specialists. The purpose of this is to combat the amateur practices and lack of expertise supposedly found not only amongst employees, but also in their managers. This chapter argues that, on the contrary, field managers possess knowledge about working conditions and are actors who are necessarily involved in organising those conditions as well as the work of their teams. In so doing, they protect employees from or expose them to the real and varying circumstances of work. This is the role that needs to be reinforced in order for safety rules to become a real part of work cultures and working practices. However, the forms of power in organisations increasingly limit the recognition of this expertise in the work of managers. The chapter advocates the importance of giving managers power to set situated organisational rules, instead of making these the exclusive prerogative of central management departments.

Historically, management as a means for governing business organizations has developed at the expense of professions as autonomous, self-regulated bodies. Therefore, the current call for “professionalization” in the domain of safety might be surprising. This chapter explores this apparent contradiction in the form of an imaginary dialogue between an operator and a manager. The current “injunction to professionalism” is critically assessed. Alternative views of professionalization are developed, with implications for alternative managerial roles.

In this chapter, the author mainly addresses the differences between France and Anglo-Saxon countries regarding two axes. First he shows the differences in terminology of the word ‘professional’ and related terms, then he highlights that their respective approaches of human and organisational factors in Occupational Health & Safety originate from their own specific history.

Current debates on professionalism and safety cover a range of interpretative challenges and theoretical perspectives, as the workshop organized by FonCSI in 2015 revealed. One avenue for consideration was to address the question of the role of professionalism in the job with regard to safety. For example, should safety training just be part of normal job training or should it have a separate and distinctive position in the training curriculum? In this paper, I consider two ways in which safety training and safety thinking are being integrated into routine managerial and technical work. The first of these is behavioural, namely to focus on the non-technical skills (NTS) for a given job, as evidenced by the airlines’ Crew Resource Management training and assessment programmes. This approach is now being adopted in other safety-critical sectors, such as acute medicine and offshore oil and gas operations. The second direction is more attitudinal in nature: it examines the relatively novel concept of chronic unease, derived from the High Reliability Organisation literature. These two approaches show that addressing both workplace behaviours (non-technical skills) and underlying attitudes to operational risks (chronic unease), can help to build protective skills for safety into the professional job repertoire.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between representations of work (rules, procedures, models, specifications, plans) and work as a situated practice, performed by real people in always unique contexts. Empirically, it is organized around two main examples, the first one being a discussion of the compartmentalization of safety seen in shipping and the railway sector. It shows how safety, as an object of management, has become decoupled from practice, and how current discourses about safety disempower practitioners and subordinate their perspectives to more “theoretical” positions. The second is based on a study of control room operators in a space research operations setting. Here safety in the sense of avoiding harm to people is not the main concern; rather it is the reliability and robustness of an experiment on the International Space Station that is at stake. This example serves as a starting point for discussing how the research and theory on industrial safety should address the different temporalities of different work situations. It also helps to discuss the role of rules and procedures to support safety, reliability and resilience within the field of safety science. Finally, some propositions about the relationship between situated practice and the management of safety are provided: how invisible aspects of situated work might be important for safety yet hard to manage, how procedures and rules might be integrated parts of situated work as much as representations of it and how different temporalities of work situations should be included in the theorizing of safety and resilience.

Organisational influences on safety outcomes are the subject of much attention in both academia and industry with a focus on how workplace factors and company systems, both formal and informal, influence workers. Many individuals who make important decisions for safety are not simply employees of a particular firm, but also members of a profession. This second social identity is little studied or acknowledged and yet is it critical for safety. This chapter addresses two key social practices that influence safety outcomes. The first is professional learning for disaster prevention. Research has shown that much professional learning is profoundly social including sharing stories and using stories directly as an input to key decisions. Another critical professional activity is development of standards. Standards are seen as authoritative sources and so ‘called up’ in legislation and yet the processes by which they are developed are opaque to those outside the small group of professionals involved. Again, this important social practice of groups of professionals remains little studied. Professional social practices such as these are worthy of much more attention from both academia and industry.

The relationship between professionalization and safety is examined from two angles. One is how professionals manage high risk by , what the trusted professional does when applying their skills and expertise in controlling a hazardous technological system. The other is , control of safety by a formal system of regulation, rules, procedures, codes and standards which constrains behaviour to remain within specified boundaries of operation but which must still somehow allow sufficient flexibility of behaviour to adapt to the specifics of the situation. By looking at some of the aspects of accidents and lessons learned, issues in safety and professionalism are highlighted which could be important topics for developing safety competence, in particular for the management of uncertainty and unforeseen risks. The handling of uncertainties and the mitigation of cognitive bias, the development of tacit knowledge and the use of lessons learned from successful recoveries are potential learning opportunities for both types of professional for uncertainty management. The chapter first sets out to clarify the meanings in the title and how they are different and possibly even conflicting in the approach to safety. This theme continues in examining how these issues are reflected in accidents and lessons learned. Finally, some possible ways forward are identified.

Based on his extensive expertise in the mining industry, Jonathan Molyneux raises the issue of the importance of operational experience, besides acquiring formal safety qualifications, to improve safety performance in high-hazard industries. He highlights the paradox by which the influencing aspect of the work of “safety professionals” as valued advisors is somehow challenged by the fact that they have to meet the compliance agenda and are therefore sometimes perceived by shop floor staff more as a “procedure-police” than as coaches. Integration versus differentiation with safety improvement strategies tailored for specific local contexts is also discussed.