Paper short abstract:

Through the narratives of European truck drivers, their fleet managers and Norwegian road side inspectors I explore the bending and breaking of safety related rules in the heavy goods transport sector.

Paper long abstract:

The bending and breaking of safety related rules in the heavy goods transport sector is well known in the public conversation about traffic safety, but so far no comprehensive effort has been made to explain the scope of the behaviour. The intentional bending and breaking of safety realted rules and regulation by actors in the European road based commercial goods transport sector is also a significant but understudied phenomenon in the trans-disciplinary safety science literature. Especially ethnographic studies based on participant observation with the goals of producing context sensitive holistic sociocultural descriptions are almost absent. One reason for this might be that the transdisciplinary Safety science is reliant on systems modelling and having ethnographic descriptions can be found to be muddying the waters and challenging models rather than contributing to what is seen as the overall goal of building safer societies. Through the use of several sources I chart possibilities for, the performance of, and the consequences following the bending of rules though the entire transport chain from consignor to consignee.