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Abstract
The process by which occupational risks in industry and manufacturing emerge has been established as a subject of research in sociology. This often-contentious process draws on toxicological findings that may or may not be accepted as established, and on epidemiological observations of pathologies. Logically enough, there has been little interest in the toxicological risks of innovative industrial technologies, due to a lack of specific cases. With the development of new technologies such as nanomaterials, the question of risks has been formally raised but has not been addressed in terms of clear toxicological results or epidemiological observations. My goal in this article is to introduce the notion of “innovative risk” to refer to a process of making risks a subject of research and discussion before evidence of health problems has been established. By examining how French labor administrations and occupational medicine organizations monitor such risks in companies and research laboratories, I will demonstrate a tension between, on the one hand, the acknowledged specificity of these risks, and, on the other hand, the standardization of actual oversight. This tension calls into question the ability of research on industrial occupational risks to approach and analyze innovative risks.
Highlights
In France, scholarly literature has emphasized the complexity of the process by which occupational risks emerge, and in particular the dif iculty of establishing pathologies connected to industry and manufacturing
It rapidly became obvious that nanotechnologies involve occupational risks, especially at a time still marked by fallout from the problem of asbestos
Nanomaterials represent a change in how technological risks are conceptualized for two reasons
Summary
In France, scholarly literature has emphasized the complexity of the process by which occupational risks emerge, and in particular the dif iculty of establishing pathologies connected to industry and manufacturing. Sociological research on industrial occupational risks has generally focused on problems that are “justi ied” by toxicological information or epidemiological observations, even when these are unclear Counil and Henry (2018) Approaches based on such observations and information take a retrospective view that tends to ignore new scienti ic and technological developments and innovations. It is dif icult to provide a rigorous explanation for such refusals (in order to do so, one would have to conduct interviews with the people avoiding them...), but they did occur more frequently than in the context of other research (for example, my research on risks in the chemical or nuclear industries) They con irm the opinion shared by many administration of icials that a particular shroud of secrecy about matters relating to nanomaterials surrounds the industry. I will examine the possibility of overcoming this paradox, drawing inspiration from the Collingridge dilemma Collingridge (1980), which, applied to the present topic, states that, on the one hand, innovative risks are not formalized and, on the other, it will be dif icult to counteract them if they turn out to constitute clear health hazards once the activities in question have been developed at a large scale
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