Risks, Circumstances and Regulation – Historical development, diversity of structures and practices in Occupational Safety and Health inspections

Abstract

The question of how inspectorates on occupational safety and health were born and developed recalls the question of how risks were conceived and how they lead to the adoption of regulations, creation of institutions, development of their scope of work, powers and methods. What seems to have led to create regulations and inspection institutions was, interestingly, not just the importance of a risk in terms of lives lost or other harm, but that a risk be perceived as something that could possibly be mitigated through intervention. Risks to which science and techniques were unable to respond, nor risks to which no cause-effect link was possible to attribute despite their statistical impact, did not lead to the same developments. Neither did those risks considered as “normal”. New techniques and industries created “dread risks” – or risk out of the ordinary – that were critical for state intervention, regulation and inspections. Moreover, moving to “some intervention” usually takes a combination of factors including “crisis events” or broader social pressure. After the initial introduction of a new regulatory system, the way in which institutions developed and grew appears generally and strongly subject to path dependence. A glimpse of historical evolution of occupational safety and health (OSH) inspectorates in the first countries that created them enable us to understand better the contexts in which inspectorates have been created and developed, the different institutional models and approaches to fulfilling their missions, and to explain differences and practices that still hold true today.