Mathilde Bourrier

The Legacy of the High Reliability Organization Project

This article looks back over two decades of work pioneered by Todd LaPorte and colleagues, under the banner of High Reliability Theory (HRT). The article revisits the American roots of the Berkeley-based group and comments on its early and decisive fieldwork choices. It revisits some of the elements that emerged through the controversy around findings and implications of HRT. It discusses the legacy of HRT and the ethnographical impetus given to normal operations studies. The use of ethnographic and sociological methodologies gave new vitality to the study of high-risks organizations.

Bridging Research and Practice: The Challenge of 'Normal Operations' Studies

The article will present some possible explanations of the difficulty to bridge research and practice in the domain of risk management. A first block of reasons has to do with the very content of the analyses themselves. Of great importance is also the time chosen for them to be carried out. The second argument will bring to the foreground the difficulty for a lot of fruitful research to permeate into management spheres. One way to reconcile experts, scholars and decision makers may come from new attention devoted to organisational design and formal structures. This calls for the study of normal operations as opposed to relying too exclusively on accident cases and crisis situations. We believe that this perspective can help us improve our level of understanding of complex organisations, because it focuses on the duality of organisational life: the dark side and the bright side, always tightly coupled.

Unresolved issues in risk communication research: the case of the H1N1 pandemic (2009-2011).

The 2009 H1N1 pandemic had considerable impact on risk perceptions, vaccination campaigns, and global health governance. In this context, risk communication issues have been probably the most puzzling and the least understood in retrospect. This article reviews the current knowledge on the following issues: risk and pandemic perceptions; vaccination perceptions and practices; rumors and rumor propagation; and health risk communication. It also highlights the research gaps in these areas that remain to be further explored in the future.

Transparency in Health Care: Disclosing Adverse Events to the Public

The topic of transparency has received increasing academic interest in recent years. Transparency can be interpreted as conducting affairs in the open, being subject to public scrutiny, or admitting to problems when they arise. This chapter analyses transparency in disclosing adverse events to the public in Norway. We use the widely publicized Daniel case to show the communication between the regulator and the public, discussing key elements of transparency in the healthcare setting, including the role of media. The Daniel case describes an accidental tonsillectomy characterized by cover-up, failure of the initial regulatory and hospital follow-up, coming to a head when media shone a spotlight on the case. The media coverage caused social amplification of the risk communication resulting in regulatory follow-up having to apply new forms of transparency strategies to rebuild trust in the public. By using the Daniel case as emblematic of Norwegian risk communication strategies in health care, improvements should be made along the lines of direct and adequate information exchange according to patient rights, and efforts to foster open and transparent regulatory and organizational cultures to ensure public trust.

Risk Communication 101: A Few Benchmarks

Risk and crisis communication constitutes a rich field of expertise and practices. For a long time, it has been mainly viewed and still is, as a practical rather than a theory-based approach. Numerous manuals and “how-to” books have been published over the last decades. It is often believed that they provide more recipes, refined over the years, than solid scientific literature upon which an evidence-based risk and crisis communication strategy can be developed and fostered. This review is based partially on a surprise: contrary to what was expected, there is an abundant stock of theories and approaches, albeit very diverse. The intention of this chapter is to guide the reader through some of them, considered, maybe over hastily, as the most prominent. The objective is not to produce an exhaustive review, but rather to provide an orientation in a field, whose popularity is growing throughout industries, companies, public health institutions, and public services.

Risk Communication for the Future

The conventional approach to risk communication, based on a centralized and controlled model, has led to blatant failures in the management of recent safety related events. In parallel, several cases have proved that actors not thought of as risk governance or safety management contributors may play a positive role regarding safety. Building on these two observations and bridging the gap between risk communication and safety practices leads to a new, more societal perspective on risk communication, that allows for smart risk governance and safety management.