Francesca Odella

What Do You Mean By Safety? Conflicting Perspectives on Accident Causation and Safety Management in a Construction Firm

This paper is based on the assumption that people in organizations do not learn ‘safety’; rather, they learn safe working practices. Therefore, there are as many safety cultures as there are communities of practice inside an organization contributing to the social construction of safety. Ambiguity plays a central role in this process since consensus and dissensus on what is safety and danger are issue-specific and constantly fluctuating. The analysis of the explanations of the cause of accidents held by two communities of practice ‐ engineers and site managers ‐ sheds light on sense-making processes relevant to the understanding of safety and to the design of a safer organization.

Technology Studies and the Sociological Debate on Monitoring of Social Interactions

The article reviews methodological perspectives adopted in the analysis of social implications of scientific and technical developments and in particular the current sociological debate involving monitoring technologies and social research. A particular attention is devoted to social network analysis, an emergent area of sociological research that focuses on the relational implications of technologies in organizations, small groups and other contexts of social participation. Using case studies and examples of technologies implementation, the article describes the advancements in this field of enquiry and highlights the main elements of the structure of interactions in virtual and technology mediated communications. It also pays attention to the implications of human interaction monitoring technologies such as video surveillance and GPS tracking, and the public role that sociological research can have in advancing ethical and organizational issues related with their adoption.

Privacy Concerns and Networks of Communication among Classmates

The collection of network data referring to social interactions is among the topic more significant and interesting in the research process. Most of the advancements in this area benefit from the introduction of new technologies and the improvement of techniques for the collection and retrieval of data. The collection of information concerning multiple dimensions of personal interactions and the treatment of personal data, however, may pose privacy and ethical problems. In particular, the operative definition of privacy has been attempted in social and psychological research in the form of multi-dimensional indicators and variables referring to the individual perception of sensitivity and confidentiality of information. Recently, however, some attempts have been done to define privacy from a relational point of view using concepts and structural properties from social network analysis. The paper addresses this debate and by means of empirical network data on communication networks discuss the issue of privacy in network data collection and analysis.