Contracting and Safety

This open access book examines the increase in outsourcing, contracting and subcontracting as ways of organising work. It explores the impact of these employment arrangements on public safety, particularly when they are linked to complex supply networks in a range of engineering industries including oil and gas, nuclear power and aviation.

The brief provides practical recommendations on how best to manage arrangements that target short-term profitability and also maintain excellence in long-term safety outcomes. The brief is a source of advice for organisations on how to maximise the benefits and minimise long-term system reliability issues that can be introduced by contracting and outsourcing, rather than assuming it to be a wholly negative or positive practice.

Contracting and Safety comprises qualitative, empirical studies focusing on high-reliability organisation. As such, this brief provides a rich picture of the experience of working in complexsupply chains. It will be of interest to researchers in industrial safety, as well as safety professionals and project managers within engineering industries.

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access Explores solutions to long-term public and worker safety when using contractors within engineering industries Provides advice on how organisations can maximise the benefits and minimise the safety risks

Autorentext

Professor Jan Hayes has 35 years' experience in safety and risk management. Her current activities cover academia, consulting and regulation. She is Program Leader for the social science safety research activities of the Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre and a Board Safety Assurance Advisor for Airservices Australia. Prof Hayes is a former member of the Advisory Board of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority. Her research interests all connect to organisational accident prevention and include professionalism, expertise, decision making and use of standards.

Stephanie Tillement holds an Associate Professor appointment at IMT Atlantique. After graduating in industrial engineering, she then obtained a PhD in industrial sociology. Her research interests focus on process safety (notably in the railway and nuclear industries), high-risk project management and risk governance. She has been coordinating the AGORAS research project since 2014, funded by the French national research agency (ANR) and the Investissement d'Avenir program on nuclear risks governance and management. Within the framework of the RESOH Chair (REsearch on Safety Organization Human), she leads research on high reliability project organizing and the impacts of outsourcing on safety. She has publishing experience in various peer-reviewed journals and books, such as management, Project Management Journal, Cognition Technology & Work and Presses des Mine.

Inhalt
Part I: Maintenance & Operations.- 1. Contracting and Safety: Lessons From Observing an Outsourcing Process 'in the Making'.- 2. Organisational Complexity and Subcontracting Management: Confronting Lessons From Accidents and From Normal Operation Safety Assessment.- 3. Inter-Organizational Collaboration for the Safety of Railway Vehicles: a Japanese Case.- Effects of Tendering on the Resilience of Critical Services.- Part II: Capital Projects and Supply Chains.- 4. Organizing for Nuclear Safety: Exploring General Applicability of Relational Contracting to Nuclear Industry Projects with Practitioners.- 5. Playing at the Margins of Notoriously Unreliable Utility Streetworks.- 6. The Fragmentation of Workplace Safety: Long-Term Challenges for Project-Based Organization of Large Construction Projects.- 7. How Outsourcing Impacts Process Safety: the Case of Nuclear Waste Storage.- Part III: Regulation and Risk Governance.- 8. Outsourcing Risk Governance: Using Consultants to Deliver Regulatory Functions.- 9. Discussion on the Issues of Safety and Sustainability of Fragmented Systems.- 10. Outsourcing as a Way to Uphold the Scientific Method: the Case of Outsourcing of the Technical Dialogue.-11. Concluding Remarks. <p