Contradictions in Risk Management in Marine Transportation. J. M. Kendra, Department of Geography, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Risk management efforts in the 21st century will have to resolve lingering contradictions brought on by technological change and occupational reorganization in certain risky industries. A significant segment of the risk management enterprise occurs at the small or local scale, with the application of theory, experience, judgment, and craft skill. This paper presents results from an ongoing study of the risk perceptions, and responses, of merchant marine officers. It presents ships’ officers as risk managers and examines the contradictions they must resolve in pursuit of safe operations aboard ship given the changing nature of navigation and ship management tasks. One such contradiction is the proliferation of automated navigation systems whose proper functioning must be verified with more conventional methods. Another contradiction lies in the continuing conflict between reducing risk and enhancing competitiveness. It is here that the economic interests of ship operators, and the safety interests of the larger society, seem to coincide. Merchant seamen have become subjects of blame, so that their physical substitution by technology, and professional substitution by bureaucracy, appear reasonable and palatable, and herein lies the contradiction: the virtual redefinition, by ship operators and regulators, of seafarers themselves as elements of operational risk. Resolving these contradictions requires redefining what constitutes proper practice in merchant ship operations, and it requires that merchant marine officers, as experts within a complex and hazardous sociotechnical system, renegotiate their status as credible risk managers.
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