The working paper looks back over two decades of work pioneered by Todd LaPorte and colleagues, under the banner of High Reliability Theory (HRT). It revisits the American roots of the Berkely-based group and comments on its early and decisive fieldwork choices. It discusses the legacy of HRT and the ethnographical twist given to "normal operations" studies. It helps understand how and why ethnographical and sociological methodologies provide new insights to the study of High-Risks Industries.
Major accidents keep occurring that seem preventable and that have similar systemic causes. Too often, we fail to learn from the past and make inadequate changes in response to losses. Examining the assumptions and paradigms underlying safety engineering may help identify the problem. The assumptions questioned in this paper involve four different areas: definitions of safety and its relationship to reliability, accident causality models, retrospective vs. prospective analysis, and operator error. Alternatives based on systems thinking are proposed.
Berzelius failed to make use of Faraday's electrochemical laws in his laborious determination of equivalent weights.