Jean-Christophe Le Coze
Risk Research Director
Ineris
Beyond the long-standing opposition of HRO vs NA?
The history of safety holds that high-reliability organisation (HRO) and normal accident (NA) were two opposing perspectives in the understanding and analysis of safety-critical systems such as nuclear power plants, aviation or chemical plants. Should this be so?
A closer look at this history, the history of this debate and beyond, reveals that this opposition was not really the only way to view the two schools. It wasn’t necessary to pit them against each other. Within, but also outside this opposition, other authors followed complementary paths, and other options were possible to write another history and to offer another way forward for today. Perrow for instance made a strong contribution to the conditions for high-reliability, a sociological and political contribution based on his vision of a “society of organisations”. He was not alone in offering the possibility of a complementary path rather than an opposition between the study of accidents and the study of daily operations. Yet, the history of safety has remained silent on this subject, preferring the long-standing opposition between the two schools.
The aim of this presentation is to show otherwise. It will show a different, yet complementary way forward from the 1980s to the 2020s, to tackle some of the most pressing contemporary challenges of safety-critical systems in a context of global scales (this presentation is based on ideas developed in articles, and in Post Normal Accident- Post NA).
Jean-Christophe Le Coze is a research director at INERIS (National Institute for the Industrial Environment and Risks) in France. He holds a PhD (2011) in safety and risk management from Ecole des Mines de Paris. He has been studying and working with safety-critical organisations for more than twenty years (chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, nuclear, railways, oil & gas), promoting a cognitive, sociological and strategic view of safety in increasingly global operating landscapes.
Jean-Christophe is regularly consulted by private and public organisations. He is known for his combination of practice and theory, his promotion of safety science research.
He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of several books including Safety in the Digital Age (with Stian Antonsen) (2023); Post Normal Accident. Revisiting Perrow’s classic (2020); Safety Science Research. Evolution, Challenges and New Directions (2019); His recent articles include “NASA, SpaceX, safety and (Post) Bureaucracy” (2024), “Coupling and Complexity at the global scale” (2023).
He is an Associate Editor of the journal Safety Science and is a member of several Think Tanks. He teaches safety in engineering and sociology universities.