Work organisation and industrial safety: a case study in three industries

Abstract

Industrial accidents have largely been ignored by sociologists as a phenomenon worthy of study. In this thesis, I suggest that they can be explained by utilising existing sociological theory rather than by developing a new area of sociology. There are two areas of sociological theory which can be readily utilised for the analysis of industrial accidents. The first is the critique of official statistics which has been most prominent in the labelling and conflict schools from the sociology of deviance, but which has also been used to critique the use of other forms of official statistics and the second is analyses of organisation structure. Firstly, the former proved to be particularly useful for critiquing the theory and methodology of accident research as a discipline. This critique was undertaken because of the lack of sociological research on industrial accidents, in an effort to identify a basis for the development of a sociological explanation of them. Accident research as a discipline is very similar in form to positivist criminology. Its major subject matter is the individual victim of accidents and his/her immediate physical surroundings. The attempt, in general, is to identify the causes of accidents in these terms. It is suggested within the thesis that for sociological purposes this is inadequate because the social relations, both formal and informal, within which people work are neglected and because to study only accidents in which people are injured is to falsely limit the subject matter. That is, to study only accidents in which people are injured is to use the terms accident and injury interchangeably and to ignore those accidents in which nobody is injured. For the purposes of the thesis an industrial accident was defined as: "Any unexpected or unplanned event which may result in injury and/or property damage." Secondly, one section of the sociological literature on organisation structure was used and two dimensions of organisation structure were considered to be important as independent variables when explaining industrial accidents which were seen as the dependent variable. The first was the division of labour within the organisation and the second was the type of authority relations within the organisation. Burns and Stalker's (1966) concepts of mechanistic and organic organisations were used as the basis for distinguishing between types of organisation structure and it is suggested that at any given level of hazard the occurrence of industrial accidents can be explained by considering these variables. The research which is reported in the thesis attempts to test the predicted relationship between organisation structure and accidents by gathering data about three organisations, two of which had a number of operating departments. The organisations which were involved in logging, glass manufacture and plastic film manufacture were chosen on the basis of the hazard involved in the work and were considered respectively as high, medium and low hazard industries.