Resilience Engineering: A State-of-the-Art Survey of an Emerging Paradigm for Organisational Health and Safety Managemen
Resilience engineering has been suggested to represent a new strategy for improving health and safety management. However, what resilience engineering is, and/or how it is different to organisational resilience is unclear. This paper provides a survey-of-
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Abstract Resilience engineering has been suggested to represent a new strategy for improving health and safety management. However, what resilience engineering is, and/or how it is different to organisational resilience is unclear. This paper provides a survey-of-the-art of RE in its widest context, based on a review of 46 articles published between January 1988 and December 2012. The state-of-art suggests that (i) a significant portion of literature comes out of work done in aviation, healthcare, nuclear and petro-chemical industries; (ii) there is no clear definition of OR, or of RE; (iii) RE lacks a clearly defined theoretical framework, and (iv) the gap between work as imagined and work as performed is an important reference point for research and practice in RE. The paper provides a working definition of RE and identifies a number of areas for advancing research and practice in this area of organisational health and safety management. Keywords Health and Organisational resilience
safety
Review
management
Resilience
engineering
1 Introduction Resilience engineering (RE) has been suggested to represent an innovative approach to improving organisational health and safety management [1, 2]. However, RE is relatively new to many human factors, safety practitioners and safety engineers, so its ability to deliver any improvements has been questioned [3]. In addition, compared to other strategies such as regulations, managements systems, safety culture or risk management; published research on RE appears patchy and disconnected. For example, publications on the topic frequently uses organizational resilience (OR) and RE interchangeably, suggesting they are one and the same. The language used in some of the published works refers to a multitude of M. Pillay (&) School of Health Sciences, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 P. Arezes (ed.), Advances in Safety Management and Human Factors, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 491, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41929-9_20
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characteristics and properties, making it a “semantically overloaded term in the sense that it means somewhat different things in different fields” [4]. Hence trying to develop a nuanced understanding of what it is (or not), can be a significant challenge for academic and researchers seeking to conduct research in RE, and for practitioners seeking to translate it into practice. This is a significant gap in the literature, which this paper aims to address, through a review of the state-of-the-art. The paper is organised as follows. First, the research method used for informing this reviews are discussed. Next, the landscape of RE is presented, followed by an analysis of published research in terms of industrial context, definitions, and dimensions/factors/measures. The paper concludes with a summary of main gaps in the literature, proposes a working definition and identifies a series of areas can for advancing research and
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