The Epistemiological and Social Use of the Notion of Behavioural Factor in the Analys of Industrial Injuries. Dominique Pécaud, Professeur associé en sociologie à l'Institut de l'Homme et de la Technologie Institut De L'homme Et De La Technologie, Rue C. Pauc, BP 20606, 44 306 NANTES cedex 3, France, télephone 02 51 85 74 06, fax 02 51 85 74 47, e-mail dpecaud@iht.atlantech.fr
The strategies used to analyse the reasons why occupational accidents occur may reveal how firms function. Today simplified analysis strategies tend to point to human behavior as being the cause of the accident and to hold the worker responsible for it. How can this tendency be accounted for, while methods and tools for analysing the reasons why occupational accidents occur have been refined?
Two errors can be blamed: first the analysis model is erroneous. Indeed the causal model used doesn't account for the reality of human work and of existing cooperation modes. Second, one ignores the fact that the error in the analysis reveals the nature of the social division of labor which exists in the firms.
A panel of safety and risk management experts described the strategies used in firms during group interviews with open questions. With this "fighting group" we also analyzed what Alain Touraine calls " the ideological documents" represented by internal accounts of occupational accidents. The panel of experts noted that in most cases the " human behaviour factor" is now mentioned as the explanatory reason when no other cause seems acceptable. In the occurrences studied, the human behaviour factor explanation came either too early or when no other explanation was available. In the former case, the analysis was truncated, which reveals attitudes commonly accepted in firms. In the latter, the nature of the causal reasoning used is questioned: this reasoning contributes to the construction of an orderly vision of human work. In both cases, the explanations proposed for the accident reveal the cooperation modes existing between the different actors involved.
Our action-oriented research could contribute to renewing explanatory modes of human work It questions the social use of causal and behavioural factors in explaining how occupational accidents occur.
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