Dr Jan Hayes, Senior Research Fellow, School of Sociology, The Australian National University.

Larry Saha Seminar Room 2175, Level 2 Haydon-Allen Building.

Investigations into the causes of man-made disasters have repeatedly shown that ongoing public safety depends on decisions made, often many years earlier, during the design stage of infrastructure or facility development. Despite the criticality of design choices in reducing risk and achieving the best safety and environmental outcomes, little social science research has studied organisational processes in workplaces that produce the technical information which ultimately dictates the form of hazardous facilities such as oil refineries, petrochemical plants and pipelines.
Studies of relationships within organizations and their impact on safety have focused mainly on management and workers, and hence issues of leadership, power and blame. This paper describes results of the first phase of a research project investigating other social relationships between different professional groups and factors that influence long term safety outcomes, including;

• variation in attitudes to safety and the environment between professions
• the role of technical professionals in organisations and the need for trust in decision making,
• structural contributions to conflict between technical professionals and project managers, and,
• the impact on professional identity of a legislated professional registration scheme for engineers.

The second phase of this project will be a longitudinal study to track attitudes and key relationships for a large resources development project as the project team crosses a series of major milestones. 

The paper concludes with some reflections on challenges of undertaking sociological work in this highly applied way.