The psychology of accident investigation: epistemological, preventive, moral and existential meaning-making

This paper extends research on accident investigation as exercises in political sensemaking, by considering the possible psychological meaning-making purposes of accident investigation. Accident investigations and reports serve epistemological or preventive aims: finding out what went wrong and avoiding recurrence. These are not necessarily the same: the variables that explain a particular event might diverge from those that help forestall a larger family of events. In addition, accident investigation serves moral and existential purposes. Accident investigations are (often implicitly) expected to render people's suffering accountable to reason and open to solution, prevention and elimination. The Western world tends to locate both the meaning and cause of suffering in the realm of human moral choice, which typically condenses accounts of failure down to single acts and actors. This competes with increasingly complex epistemological narratives of accidents that have neither obvious causes nor clear, linear cause–effect relationships

Deferring to expertise versus the prima donna syndrome: a manager's dilemma

Deference to operational or engineering expertise is considered critical for maintaining safety in many industries. At the same time, legitimating specialized knowledge can help create "prima donnas," expert operators who attain considerable organizational status and informal power. Safety can be used as a lever to gain industrial advantage or maintain inequitable perquisites. This paper first considers the common consensus about the need to defer to expertise in safety-critical organizations and industries and assesses available research on the relationship between deference to expertise and safety. Then, it reviews two psychological literatures that illuminate some of the cognitions, behaviors and organizational dynamics behind a prima donna syndrome: one on entitlement and another on organizational narcissism. Conclusions and recommendations center on how to defer to expertise (not necessarily experts) while dealing with "prima donnas.

On the epistemology and ethics of communicating a Cartesian consciousness

Researchers have made situation awareness into a researchable, scientific concept and generated practical progress mainly by modeling it on a natural-scientific ideal of empiricism and positivism. Crucially, in the manner of Cartesian dualism, it assumes that the world is objectively available and apprehensible, and can be compared to the internal corresponding mirror (the SA) of it. This has involved epistemological and ethical sacrifices. Most importantly, people now get blamed for losing SA. This happens in research, investigations, media and judicial contexts, where in hindsight it is pointed out that their “mind” did not get the crucial bits of “matter” that were supposedly available to them

Dekker -Prosecuting professional mistake: Secondary victimization and a research agenda for criminology Prosecuting professional mistake: Secondary victimization and a research agenda for criminology

Abstract This paper investigates a largely unexplored area in criminology: the secondary victimization of professionals whose mistake has been turned into a crime. It presents the criminal prosecution of professional mistake as something that is seen a growing problem in a number of safety-critical domains such as healthcare, aviation, shipping and construction, as it may seriously threaten safety initiatives in these fields. Secondary victimization of professionals accused of crime is then explored as a possible research topic in its own right, but seen to meet obstacles related to the field of victimology, as well as the epistemological propensities in both criminology and many safety-critical domains. The paper also presents some of the possible social factors behind increasing criminalization of professional mistake, a fruitful area for social-constructionist criminology. _______________________________________________________________________

Speaking for the second victim

A broad issue in cognitive systems engineering is at stake here. If we want to learn from practitioners’ interactions with each other and technology, we need to study their practice. Process tracing methods are part of a larger family of cognitive task analysis but aim specifically to analyze how people’s understanding evolved in parallel with the situation unfolding around them during a particular problem-solving episode. Process tracing methods are extremely useful, if not indispensable, in the investigation of incidents and accidents