Near miss research shifts the conceptual focus away from the negative outcome of events to the study of everyday close calls and represents an alternative pathway into knowledge production. The discipline of sociology is well suited for the study of near misses given its focus on social context, social meanings, and analyzing social interactions and patterns of group behaviour. This article discusses the challenges that researchers will face when conducting near miss research as well as different near miss data collection strategies. A comparison of two unique near miss data sets, on the same population, is also provided in order to illustrate that different methodologies capture different types of near miss information. Near misses represent an untapped area of research not yet fully explored by sociologists and social scientists.
Tensions across disciplines and methodologies over what constitutes appropriate academic voice in writing is far from arbitrary and instead is rooted in competing notions of epistemology, representation, and science. In this paper, I examine these tensions as well as address current issues affecting academic voice such as gender bias and the rise of social media. I begin by discussing reflexivity in research and then turn to the ways in which personal-reflexive voice has been hidden and revealed by academic writers. I also illustrate how the commercialization of academic science intersects with the use of distant-authoritative voice in sometimes corrupting ways. I examine variations in academic voice as they relate to issues of researcher emotion, class, race, and gender. Finally, I discuss the scientization of qualitative research and resulting increased interaction between scholars of varying epistemological positions which I argue can increase attention to the epistemological underpinnings of academic voice.
Résumé Le respect des lois et des réglementations implique l'existence, dans les organisations, de processus et de dispositifs qui permettent cette mise en conformité. Se fondant sur une ethnographie participante des modes de gestion de la sécurité dans une entreprise de fabrication industrielle, l'article montre que plusieurs facteurs culturels, personnels et structuraux contraignent les ouvriers dans l'exercice de leurs droits à la sécurité. Il est ainsi observé que les processus informels de gestion des risques sont préférés aux processus formels qui visent à faire respecter ces lois et réglementations. Dans l'usine étudiée, aucun système endogène ne s'est donc développé en pratique pour assurer l'application des lois sur la sécurité que les individus eux-mêmes se doivent de mettre en œuvre. La stratégie néolibérale de responsabilisation des salariés est donc aussi discutée dans cet article pour montrer la force des organisations face aux lois encadrant la sécurité sur les lieux de travail.
The right to refuse unsafe work & the "internal responsibility system" represent a fundamental shift in ideology over how workplace health & safety are governed. Using qualitative data, I provide a grounded critique of this shift & demonstrate that the right to refuse is continually evolving through its everyday application; the local definition of what constitutes risk is constantly being negotiated. Even when workers do not formally use this right to deal with a hazard, they nonetheless engage in the local construction of how this safety right is conceptualized, defined, & exercised. 1 Figure, 40 References. Adapted from the source document.
AbstractThis article examines the relationship between information consumption and mental health during the early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Adopting a qualitative approach, we interviewed 39 people in British Columbia, Canada between October and December 2020. Interestingly, half of the participants did not want to seek out new information on COVID‐19, making their early insights and initial confusion salient. While some individuals did desire up‐to‐date information on outbreaks and new risks, many expressed confusion over what was perceived to be an evolving landscape of public health policy and practice. Overall, our research found that capacity issues, information overload/fatigue, politics, distrust, and competing sources of news all contributed to a culture of confusion towards public health information. As a consequence, this confusion resulted in knowledge uncertainty about the virus, vaccinations, and the pandemic itself. Our findings highlight the need for a host of future projects that examine how citizens experience disempowerment and limited agency towards compliance with health and safety initiatives.
Employees who work alone are at greater risk of workplace violence. One of the higher‐risk lone worker occupations in North America is truck driving. Drawing on interviews with 158 truck drivers across the United States and Canada, this article examines how truck drivers interpret and experience both interpersonal and impersonal forms of workplace violence. Rather than rely on police enforcement and safety regulations, the truck drivers in this study believed that they were primarily on their own with regard to workplace violence. As a result, truck drivers described how they continually engage in informal personal safety strategies in order to decrease their chances of being victimized. These findings reveal how neoliberal responsibilization approaches to health and safety serve to conceal structural patterns of power and risk by containing individual responsibility for safety at the frontline. Overall, this study points to the need for law and policy to better incorporate the frontline experiences of workers when attempting to decrease the risk of workplace violence.
The paper deals with legal intermediaries, as two streams of research apprehend and define them in recent and dynamic works. One, rooted in political science, studies regulatory intermediaries (LeviFaur et al., 2017; Bes, 2019), as actors between regulators and regulated, whereas the other, rooted in the Law and Society field and sociology, analyses legal intermediaries (Edelman, 2016; Talesh and Pélisse, 2019 ; Billows and alii 2019), as a broader and more bottom up category describing actors handling and dealing with legal rules even if they are not legal professionals. The article reviews these two approaches, showing their proximity but also differences and evoking empirical examples of these legal intermediaries like managers and union activists in companies, safety officers or job counsellors in private or public organizations. The paper then advances the need to study frontline workers with whom legal intermediaries interact in organizations, to understand how regulations and rules are implemented and influence social and economic practices in organizations. It finally shows how frontline workers are increasingly being called upon to become legal intermediaries themselves, not without consequences on the increased accountability expected from them. ; L'article porte sur les intermédiaires du droit, appréhendés par deux courants de recherche qui en proposent récemment des définitions. L'un, développé plutôt en science politique, étudie des intermédiaires du droit (regulatory intermediaries) qui recouvrent une série d'acteurs situés entre les régulateurs et les régulés (Levi-Faur et al., 2017 ; Bes, 2019), tandis que l'autre, enraciné dans l'approche Law and Society et la sociologie, analyse les intermédiaires du droit de manière plus large et bottom up, comme des acteurs rencontrant et maniant des règles juridiques dans leurs activités professionnelles, sans pour autant être des professionnels du droit (Edelman, 2016 ; Talesh et Pélisse, 2019 ; Billows and alii 2019). L'article passe en revue ces deux ...
International audience ; The paper deals with legal intermediaries, as two streams of research apprehend and define them in recent and dynamic works. One, rooted in political science, studies regulatory intermediaries (LeviFaur et al., 2017; Bes, 2019), as actors between regulators and regulated, whereas the other, rooted in the Law and Society field and sociology, analyses legal intermediaries (Edelman, 2016; Talesh and Pélisse, 2019 ; Billows and alii 2019), as a broader and more bottom up category describing actors handling and dealing with legal rules even if they are not legal professionals. The article reviews these two approaches, showing their proximity but also differences and evoking empirical examples of these legal intermediaries like managers and union activists in companies, safety officers or job counsellors in private or public organizations. The paper then advances the need to study frontline workers with whom legal intermediaries interact in organizations, to understand how regulations and rules are implemented and influence social and economic practices in organizations. It finally shows how frontline workers are increasingly being called upon to become legal intermediaries themselves, not without consequences on the increased accountability expected from them. ; L'article porte sur les intermédiaires du droit, appréhendés par deux courants de recherche qui en proposent récemment des définitions. L'un, développé plutôt en science politique, étudie des intermédiaires du droit (regulatory intermediaries) qui recouvrent une série d'acteurs situés entre les régulateurs et les régulés (Levi-Faur et al., 2017 ; Bes, 2019), tandis que l'autre, enraciné dans l'approche Law and Society et la sociologie, analyse les intermédiaires du droit de manière plus large et bottom up, comme des acteurs rencontrant et maniant des règles juridiques dans leurs activités professionnelles, sans pour autant être des professionnels du droit (Edelman, 2016 ; Talesh et Pélisse, 2019 ; Billows and alii 2019). L'article passe en revue ces deux approches, en montrant leur proximité mais aussi leurs différences et en évoquant des exemples empiriques de ces intermédiaires du droit ancrés dans la seconde perspective évoquée, comme les managers et les syndicalistes en entreprises, les responsables de santé sécurité ou les conseillers en emploi dans les organisations privées ou publiques. Le papier souligne ensuite la nécessité d'étudier les travailleurs de première ligne (frontline workers) avec lesquels les intermédiaires du droit interagissent dans les organisations, afin de comprendre comment les règles juridiques et les réglementations sont mises en œuvre et influencent le travail dans les organisations. Il montre enfin comment les travailleurs de première ligne sont de plus en plus appelés à devenir eux-mêmes des intermédiaires du droit, non sans conséquences sur la responsabilisation accrue qui est attendue de ces travailleurs ordinaires.
AbstractRegulatory studies assume that citizens can act as regulators to complement or correct failing state and market forms of regulation. Yet, there is a growing literature that shows that in reality citizens may fail to be effective regulators. This paper systematically analyses how power inequalities obstruct citizens in their regulatory roles. It compares four case studies with highly different social and political contexts but with similar outcomes of citizens failing to regulate risk. The case studies are analyzed by operationalizing sociological and political science ideas about manifestations of enabling and controlling forms of power in order to understand the way power inequalities obstruct citizens in their regulatory roles across diverse contexts. The article shows how citizens, from farmers and manual workers in both authoritarian developing and democratic developed contexts to even highly trained medical professionals from the US, have limited agency and are disempowered to act as regulators. Our analysis reveals that five patterns of disempowerment play a crucial role in obstructing successful society‐based regulation: (i) dependency, (ii) capacity, (iii) social hierarchy, (iv) discursive framing, and (v) perverse effects of legal rights.
