Co-producing knowledge: challenges of the transdisciplinary research in pandemic times

Abstract

Human Factors is a broad area of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies and research focused on the perspective of the interaction between organizational, group and individual factors that aims at improving the performance and safety of people in complex organizations and socio-technical environments. Knowledge to develop solutions to the complex problems that arise in this context can be co-produced by academic and non-academic actors through a transdisciplinary research framework that integrates the daily practices of stakeholders and creates structures that make co-production spaces effective for corporate’s practices. This paper present and discuss the strategies and challenges for developing spaces for human factors-based knowledge co-production on a transdisciplinary research project during the pandemic period of COVID-19. This ongoing research was designed to develop interactions and to co-produce knowledge aimed at the safety culture of companies in the oil and gas sector. Under the imposition of social distance and its consequent challenges, strategies to promote interaction, iteration, sharing, integration, co-creation, and co-production of knowledge had to be redesigned. Based on partial results, the research discusses and analyze the main dilemmas for the knowledge coproduction focusing on the 30 researchers, and on the knowledge coproduction between researchers and stakeholders. Although the COVID-19 pandemic had imposed new forms of relationships, the main challenges remained on the integration of knowledge as perceived by the research team. This paper presents the confrontation of the knowledge co-production challenges imposed by the new context associated with addressing two new constructs for the oil and gas industry, human factors and resilience, to improve safety culture. The discussion suggests and presents possibilities to overcome these challenges to continuous stimulate co-production of knowledge in these organizational environments.