Emilie Bisbau: The safety system: how safety officers interact between head office and site locations

This research will focus on the interactions of safety officers working in high-risk companies. Our analysis of their work will be conducted from an organisational perspective, examining how the relationship between head office and industrial sites or construction sites is structured. As key players in safety, they carry out their work in contexts characterised by a rise in regulations, standards and processes, and therefore by an increasingly strong bureaucracy (in the sociological sense), particularly in facilities classified for environmental protection (ICPE). The aim here is to examine how, within this highly regulated and bureaucratic environment, they can develop, implement and drive a policy of prevention and anticipation that combines both regulated and managed safety.

In an increasingly regulated working environment, occupational health and safety professionals are seeing a rise in bureaucracy that tends to create a divide within their work between occupational safety and operational safety (Rae et al., 2019), which, for some professionals, can contribute to a growing sense of ‘blues’ in their practice (Le Coze, 2024). The tendency for organisations to attempt to address in advance and formally the multiple requirements they set themselves or which are imposed upon them (ambitious economic targets, regulatory constraints, vigilance regarding risks now extending to include cybersecurity) encourages the production of standards that raise questions about how these relate to site-specific circumstances.

How can this be reconciled with site-specific contexts? How can we strike a balance between central standards and the constraints and challenges faced by sites in their role as prevention practitioners? Our subject places us at the crossroads of several traditional approaches within sociology, and the social sciences more generally: the analysis of organisations, their dynamics and, in particular, the relationships between actors; the analysis of activity; and the analysis of occupational dynamics and professional identities. We will situate our approach at this intersection, anchoring the study in an analysis of the activities of occupational safety professionals within a multidisciplinary field shaped by safety science (Le Coze, 2019). The company chosen as the field of study is a high-risk industry.

In a manner relevant to the thesis and our research question, the organisation has implemented a reorganisation aimed, amongst other things, at decentralising the work of its prevention officers from head office in order to bring them closer to the sites. This organisational change provides a particularly suitable context for understanding the dynamics at play in the role of prevention officer from the perspective of interactions between head office and the sites. It also has the advantage of potentially revealing the transformations that will take place in terms of perceptions of their practice and the profession more generally, or even the construction and application of rules. Having access to a structure in flux and observing it through an ethnographic approach also allows us to see how the construction of safety may evolve.

This will provide an opportunity to consider whether this decentralisation has enabled a new type of organisational structure, facilitating the creation of forums for discussion and spaces for communication, with a view to pooling information to be fed back to head office. One might also ask whether prevention workers have seized upon this change to influence standards (Gherardi, 2019). We can observe whether other tools or spaces have been deployed to disseminate information in a uniform manner to sites with very different characteristics.