Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a 40-months ethnographic research stay at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center, this paper empirically situates practices of accountability and questions the ‘managerialization’ of safety via the use of an Incident Reporting System.

Paper long abstract:

The growing use of Incident Reporting Systems (IRS) in aviation, hospitals and high-risk facilities such as nuclear power plants aims at improving the safety of these socio-technical systems by fostering organizational learning about past incidents. Our 40-months ethnographic research stay at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center SCK-CEN suggests that this aim is institutionally promoted while the use of IRS also actively contributes to disciplining and responsabilizing individuals on the one hand, and rendering the center collectively accountable toward society at large on the other hand. In this paper, we explore variously enacted forms of accountability (e.g. individuals taking responsibility for an incident, the organization transmitting detailed logs of incidents to Regulatory Authorities) and discuss how these relate to, or oppose, received and alternative views of safety. We argue that individuals resist the IRS to nurture relationships of shared accountability in which they count on each other, while managers seek to transform societal accountability into managerial accountancy. By empirically situating practices of accountability and questioning the appropriateness of 'managerializing' safety, the paper contributes to understand what sustains the current widespread commitment to the idea of incident reporting.