Ulla Forseth

Dialogue in asymmetrical power relations—modern safety regulation?

The purpose of this paper is to explore power, sensemaking and identity construction within a regulatory regime in the petroleum industry that emphasises dialogue and trust as a desired and prioritised mode of working. Based on a qualitative study, the analysis documents that dialogue becomes an arena for sensemaking among unequals, and that the regulator employs the process of identity construction as a means to promote regulatory compliance. sociated pipeline systems. It covers operators, licensees, contractors and vessel owners, and the whole petroleum-industry life cycle from exploration drilling, development and operation to cessation and removal. The petroleum industry is powerful, and oil and gas resources are an important part of the global energy system. The interplay between power and sensemaking became salient in a period around the year 2000 (Rosness & Forseth 2014), when a controversy among stakeholders concerning the safety level on the NCS threatened to disintegrate the established tripartite collaboration on HSE. Union representatives claimed that HSE conditions had deteriorated due to cost cutting, whereas industry representatives claimed that HSE conditions had never been better. After the intervention of the political and regulatory authorities, a more cooperative climate and a convergence of sensemaking gradually emerged from mid-2000. The tripartite collaboration was revitalised and tripartite arenas were established such as Safety Forum and Regulatory Forum. A major research project was initiated to help build a common perception of the risk level in the industry. We have argued that the capacity and willingness to enrol new actors, such as regulatory and political authorities and mass media, was a prerequisite for the revitalisation of tripartite collaboration. The patterns observed seem compatible with Weicks (1993) proposal of a mutual influence between sensemaking processes and organisation. In the initial phase, disintegration of collaboration reinforced and was reinforced by the failure to reach a shared understanding. In the revitalisation phase, the new collaborative arenas facilitated joint sensemaking, whereas collaboration was facilitated by enrolling the research community to help build a common perception of the risk level. The ability to engage in a conflict when HSE was under pressure, and the capacity to subsequently join forces and revitalise collaboration were equally important aspects of the robustness of the regulatory regime. A process of sensemaking through “boxing and dancing” supported HSE improvements (Rosness & Forseth 2014). 3 SENSEMAKING AND CRITICAL SENSEMAKING Sensemaking is a perspective associated with research that is interpretive, social constructionist, processual and phenomenological. Karl E. Weick introduced the term ‘sensemaking’ to organisation studies and his seminal paper on ‘Enacted sensemaking in crisis situations’ (1988) influenced crisis management and sensemaking research. Sensemaking is a lens to comprehend and theorize how people appropriate and enact their ‘realities’ (Brown et al. 2015, Maitlis & Christianson 2014, Weick 1993). There is no single agreed definition of the concept, but there is a growing consensus that sensemaking refers to those processes by which people seek to understand and give meaning to situations or events that are ambiguous, equivocal or confusing issues or events (Brown et al. 2015:266, Colville et al. 2012). An important aspect of sensemaking is understanding how different people assign different meanings to the same event. In addition to the ongoing nature of sensemaking, seven interrelated characteristics are involved: identity construction, retrospection, focus on and by extracted cues, plausibility rather than accuracy, enactive of the environment and social (Weick 1995; Mills et al. 2010:185). Sensemaking has attracted attention and become widely used in a variety of areas. Maitlis and Sonenshein (2010:552), in their review of the sensemaking literature, expand the analysis beyond merely looking at sensemaking and crisis to sensemaking in times of turbulent context and organizational change. These are also situations characterized of ambiguity, confusion and disorientation and may violate expectations (Maitlis & Christanson 2014, Weick 1988). In times of transition and uncertainty, power and sensemaking become salient (Weick & Sutcliffe 2007). Power is a key concept within the social sciences and there exist a range of frameworks. As authors such as Clegg (1993) and Gabriel (2000) emphasise, narratives provide us with insights into the nature of organizations, power relations within them, and the experience and sensemaking of their members. The accounts that dominate in organizations and the practices that become accepted are a result of negotiations that take place in structures where some voices are privileged over others (Maitlis & Sonenshein 2010). The sensemaking literature, however, has given inadequate attention to power and political processes even if power provides a context for sensemaking (Maitlis & Christanson 2014). It is not until recently that it has been unpacked in this strand of literature how other groups of employees, such as middle managers and employees, make sense of changes that differ from top-level management. In order to grasp who gives sense and who cedes sense under what conditions, it is important to explore narratives from different stakeholders. In this paper, we pay particular attention to how the use of dialogue as a regulatory strategy unfolds in a context of power asymmetries related to the regulatory role. The sensemaking perspective has been criticized for an under focus on issues such as power and context, and Mills et al. (2010:182) propose a heuristic that takes into account missing elements while operationalizing (critical) sensemaking as an analytical tool for understanding organizational events. In their outline of a critical sensemaking approach Mills et al. (2010) seek to get a better grip on how sensemaking is related to power relations in the broader social context. They emphasise the centrality of identity construction, i.e. how people answer questions such as “who are we?” and “how do we do things?”. Mills et al. (2010) suggest that “individuals with more power in organizations may also exert more power on the sensemaking of organizational members”. We propose that the notion of identify construction and the idea of exerting power on others’ sensemaking may also be applied to interactions between organisations, such as between regulatory authorities and regulated enterprises. This opens for the possibility that the regulatory authorities may offer an industry as a whole and each of its companies an attractive identity that they can maintain and strengthen by complying with the regulations and cooperating with the regulatory authorities. There is a limited body of work on sensemaking and institutions (Maitlis & Christanson 2014: 108). We are interested in (1) the sensemaking processes that take place within the context of a dialogue based regime and the encounters between regulator and the regulated, and (2) how the stakeholders make sense of these processes of sensegiving and sensemaking, e.g. the various views on how the dialogues actually function and how they ideally should function: 1. How do the regulatory authorities give and make sense of dialogue based regulation? 2. How do different stakeholders in the petroleum industry make and take sense of dialogue