Abstract
The sociotechnical systems perspective offers intriguing and potentially valuable insights into problems associated with workplace safety. While formal sociotechnical systems thinking originated in the 1950s, its application to the analysis and design of sustainable, safe working environments has not been fully developed. To that end, a Hopkinton Conference was organised to review and summarise the state of knowledge in the area and to identify research priorities. A group of 26 international experts produced collaborative articles for this special issue of Ergonomics, and each focused on examining a key conceptual, methodological and/or theoretical issue associated with sociotechnical systems and safety. In this concluding paper, we describe the major conference themes and recommendations. These are organised into six topic areas: (1) Concepts, definitions and frameworks, (2) defining research methodologies, (3) modelling and simulation, (4) communications and decision-making, (5) sociotechnical attributes of safe and unsafe systems and (6) potential future research directions for sociotechnical systems research.
Highlights
Workplace safety is a persistent, international concern
HSI has largely focused on issues associated with system design, personnel selection and training, and other human-centred aspects of complex systems, macroergonomics has focused on the role played by the many organisational and cultural factors outside of the immediate work setting that impact safe and effective work performance
A clear consensus is emerging, both among those scientists who participated in the Hopkinton Conference as well as others (e.g. Haslam et al 2005; Coakes and Coakes 2009; Hollnagel 2009; Wilson 2014), that safety improvements in increasingly complex work environments will substantially benefit from an approach that focuses on the dynamic network of safety-critical interactions between organisational and technical system components
Summary
Workplace safety is a persistent, international concern. Many decades of concerted effort within numerous scientific and technical disciplines have contributed to substantial decreases in worker injuries and fatalities, but the problem is far from solved. In their paper, Carayon et al (2015) present an overarching case for the application of sociotechnical systems thinking to the study and practice of workplace safety In so doing, they define and critically discuss key sociotechnical concepts as they relate to this area of concern. Having defined these and other related concepts (e.g. the importance of participatory design, managing trade-offs between ‘acute’ and ‘chronic’ system goals), the authors conclude with a set of recommendations for future research These include the examination of interactions between hierarchical levels of sociotechnical systems and their impact on safe work performance – a recommendation taken up in the paper by Flach et al (2015) in their analysis of communications and decision-making as mechanisms for visibility and control across hierarchical levels of such systems. Further recommendations include the study of the impact of socio-organisational context on worker safety and the identification of invariant properties and characteristics of sociotechnical systems that promote safety, a topic addressed in the paper by Kleiner et al (2015)
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