Trapping Safety into Rules—How Desirable or Avoidable Is Proceduralization?

Once safety is involved, there seems to be an irresistible push towards more norms, procedures and processes, whatever the context. This book is not a plea against proceduralization, but it does take the view that it is time to reassess how far it can still go and to what benefit. There is a growing suspicion that the path taken might in fact lead to a dead end, unless the concept of procedure and the conditions under which procedures develop are revisited.

Corinne Bieder graduated as an engineer from the Ecole Nationale SupAcrieure de Techniques AvancAces (1993). She then completed her education with master degrees in both risk management at the Ecole Centrale Paris (1994) and social sciences in La Sorbonne University (1999). She started her career doing research for ElectricitAc de France on Human Reliability Analysis in the nuclear industry actively participating in the development and deployment of the MERMOS method (1994-2000). She then joined a small consulting company, named DAcdale, to work on a variety of human factors and safety projects in a variety of hazardous domains (aviation, energy, railways, hospitals, etc). In 2005 she joined Airbus where she successively held jobs in the training and strategy departments. She is now with the safety department in charge on the corporate safety strategy. Corinne has published a book with HermA‥s-Lavoisier on human factors in risk management and a number of conference papers on human factors and safety. Mathilde Bourrier holds a PhD in Sociology from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (1996) and an Habilitation (2004). She is Professor of Sociology at the University of Geneva. Mathilde works on the social construction of safety, focusing on the conditions under which organizational reliability can be achieved and sustained. Her research interests address risk and organization theory and organizational anthropology. She has conducted extensive studies at nuclear power plants in France and in the US and has also worked in public hospitals, looking at skills and know-how transmission in Anaesthesiology. Mathilde has published four books: one with the Presses Universitaires de France, on a comparative ethnography of Nuclear Power Plants in France and in the US (1999), the second with L'Harmattan, on Organizing Reliability (2001; 2003); She co-directed a volume for Cambridge University Press with Michael Baram on Governing Risk in Genetically Modified Agriculture (2011) and a monograph based on a study conducted in Geneva Canton Hospital, looking at skills transmission in Anaesthesia (2011). In the past, she has acted as external expert and academic consultant for the French parliamentary Office of Technology Assessment, the OECD-Nuclear Energy Agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the French nuclear regulatory agency, and ElectricitAc de France (EDF).