PUB LDS 950 Sociotechnical approaches to workplace safety.pdf (508.66 kB)
Sociotechnical approaches to workplace safety: research needs and opportunities
journal contribution
posted on 2016-02-05, 14:38 authored by Michelle M. Robertson, Lawrence J. Hettinger, Patrick WatersonPatrick Waterson, Y. Ian Noy, Marvin J. Dainoff, Nancy G. Leveson, Pascale Carayon, Theodore K. CourtneyThe 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.
Practitioner Summary: Sociotechnical complexity, a characteristic of many contemporary work environments, presents
potential safety risks that traditional approaches to workplace safety may not adequately address. In this paper, we
summarise the investigations of a group of international researchers into questions associated with the application of
sociotechnical systems thinking to improve worker safety.
History
School
- Design
Published in
ERGONOMICSVolume
58Issue
4Pages
650 - 658 (9)Citation
ROBERTSON, M.M. ...et al., 2015. Sociotechnical approaches to workplace safety: research needs and opportunities. Ergonomics, 58(4), pp. 650-658.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by Taylor and FrancisVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor and Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
0014-0139Publisher version
Language
- en