1st Edition

Post Normal Accident Revisiting Perrow’s Classic

By Jean-Christophe Le Coze Copyright 2020
    208 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
    by CRC Press

    Post Normal Accident revisits Perrow’s classic Normal Accident published in 1984 and provides additional insights to our sociological view of safety-critical organisations. The operating landscape of high-risk systems has indeed profoundly changed in the past 20 to 30 years but the core sociological models of safety remain associated with classics of the 1980s and 1990s.
    This book examines the conceptual and empirical evolutions of the past two to three decades to explore their implications for safety management, based on several strands of works in various research traditions in safety (e.g. cognitive engineering and system safety, high-reliability organisation, sociology of safety, regulatory studies) and other interdisciplinary fields (e.g. international business, globalisation studies, strategy management, ecology).
    It offers a new and inciteful interpretation to the challenges of today. It investigates how globalisation has reconfigured the operating landscape of high-risk systems and emphasises the importance of thinking safety through a strategic angle. This book serves as an ideal resource for the safety professionals and safety researchers from any established disciplines such as sociology, engineering, psychology, political science or management.

    1.  Introduction. 2. The reception of NA. 3. Charles Perrow’s sociology. 4. Normal Accident, the Second Thesis. 5. Implications of the second thesis.

    Biography

    Jean-Christophe Le Coze is a safety researcher (PhD, Mines ParisTech) at INERIS, the French national institute for environmental safety. His activities combine ethnographic studies and action research in various safety-critical systems, with an empirical, theoretical, historical and epistemological orientation.