Co-Opting Regulation: Professional Control Through Discretionary Mobilization of Legal Prescriptions and Expert Knowledge

The governance of front-line professionals is a persistent organizational problem. Regulations designed to make professional work more legible and responsive to both organizational and public expectations depend on these professionals’ willing implementation. This paper examines the important question of how professional control shapes regulatory compliance. Drawing on a seventeen-month ethnographic study of a bioscience laboratory, we show how professionals deploy their discretionary judgment to assemble environmental, health, and safety regulations with their own expert practices, explaining frequently observed differential rates of regulatory compliance. We find that professional scientists selectively implement and blend formal regulations with expert practice to respond to risks the law acknowledges (to workers’ bodies and the environment) and to risks the law does not acknowledge but professionals recognize as critical (to work tasks and collegiality). Some regulations are followed absolutely, others are adapted on a case-by-case basis; in other instances, new practices are produced to control threats not addressed by regulations. Such selective compliance, adaptation and invention enact professional expertise: interpretations of hazard and risk. The discretionary enactment of regulations, at a distance from formal agents, becomes part of the technical, practical, and tacit assemblage of situated practices. Thus, paradoxically, professional expert control is maintained and sometimes enhanced as professionals blend externally imposed regulations with expert practices. In essence, regulation is co-opted in the service of professional control. This research contributes to studies of professional expertise, the legal governance of professionals in organizations, regulatory compliance, and safety cultures.

Resilience Lessons From the Southeast United States Woody Pellet Supply Chain Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic†

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) instigated a pandemic that impacted economies, employment, and shipping worldwide. This paper reviews how one international supply chain performed and identifies lessons that may be helpful to improve future resilience. Economic and employment data through November 2020 are used to review the effects of COVID-19 on operations of the bioenergy supply chain in the southeastern United States (SE United States) that utilizes wood fiber to fabricate pellets. Conditions associated with the production of pellets in the SE United States changed with the outbreak of COVID-19. Federal and state government programs and classification of workers in this sector as “essential” during the pandemic helped maintain the woody pellet supply chain and other industries during a period of general shut down in 2020. The availability of personal protective equipment, long-term supply contracts, and established safety cultures are among the factors that enhance supply chain resilience while limited availability of skilled workers, inadequate stakeholder engagement, and dependence on external policies are among factors that reduce resilience. The analysis concludes with recommendations for the SE pellet supply chain, and other biomass supply chains, to improve their resilience to future disturbances. When best practices are implemented, SE United States biomass offers opportunities to contribute to post-pandemic economic recovery while incentivizing better forest resource management.

‘Guys, get your guns out!’ – An autobiographical account of a US community corrections training academy

This article addresses community corrections training from the perspective of a former practitioner. Though CC training has received modest consideration, academies’ roles in reinforcing occupational cultures are nearly absent from the literature. This article addresses this gap with an autobiographical account of an academy experience and shows that not only did the profession appear to attract candidates with public safety orientations, but also that the academy reinforced those orientations through a disproportionate focus on use of force and officer safety. The article considers challenges policymakers and managers face when attempting to implement reform in public safety cultures.

Multi-Faceted Ergonomics Assessment in Medical Device Manufacturing: A Case Study

Background: According to the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were over 4,000 preventable injury related deaths. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration emphasizes that safety cultures should consist of shared beliefs, practices, and attitudes that exist at an establishment. The purpose of this industry-sponsored research project was to assist a medical manufacturing facility with safety program OSHA compliance. Method: Job Safety Analysis (JSA), also ca lled job hazard analysis, and facility inspections were used to identify hazards focused on the worker, task, tools, and the work environment. Results: Areas with high hazard scores according to the JSA were a ssigned to supervisors and the research team to provide immediate process and environment changes. Conclusion: JSA is a great tool to identify safety hazards on a job site though job functions. This will prevent injuries and a llow even small companies to remain compliant with federal regulations. Creating an atmosphere from top to bottom with a culture of safety responsibility andownership can promote a safe and productive environment.

Elaboration of an integral system of company management by developing corporate and safety culture

Purpose. To develop a model of the integrated system for company management, basing on the integration of the quality control and labour safety systems that differs from the known ones by combination of the processes based on the increase in the level of corporate safety cultures within a company. Methodology. Formation of the basis for integration of the quality control and labour safety systems relies on the complex use of system analysis methods that, in combination with Deming and Shewhart cycle and with the performance of corresponding estimation and analysis of the organizational and safety cultures, help plan the practices, procedures, and resources for stage-by-stage combination of the systems as well as maintain the obtained results. Findings. An approach for efficient development of the integrated management system has been proposed on the basis of the analysis of levels of organizational and safety cultures; in future, this will help select such tools and practices that will allow having painless stage-by-stage combination of the available systems of quality control and labour safety with the substantiation of the necessary recourses. It has been established that a key element of the combination is readiness and motivation of not only top management but also linear management and ordinary workers to accept new technologies, approaches, and practices aimed at integration of those cultures, which is provided by the efficient staff involvement by means of corresponding training and constant communication to form the risk-oriented thinking. Originality. A structure and model of the integrated system of quality and safety management as a unified interdependent mechanism have been proposed on the basis of the combination of organizational and safety cultures; that has allowed forming the unified principles for the development of a combined management system. Practical value. The control parameters have been determined to identify stages of integration of the quality control and labour safety systems basing on the attitude to values and formed worldview as well as on the gaining the necessary competences by the workers.

The Collective Leadership for Safety Culture (Co-Lead) Team Intervention to Promote Teamwork and Patient Safety

Traditional hierarchical leadership has been implicated in patient safety failings internationally. Given that healthcare is almost wholly delivered by multidisciplinary teams, there have been calls for a more collective and team-based approach to the sharing of leadership and responsibility for patient safety. Although encouraging a collective approach to accountability can improve the provision of high quality and safe care, there is a lack of knowledge of how to train teams to adopt collective leadership. The Collective Leadership for Safety Cultures (Co-Lead) programme is a co-designed intervention for multidisciplinary healthcare teams. It is an open-source resource that offers teams a systematic approach to the development of collective leadership behaviours to promote effective teamworking and enhance patient safety cultures. This paper provides an overview of the co-design, pilot testing, and refining of this novel intervention prior to its implementation and discusses key early findings from the evaluation. The Co-Lead intervention is grounded in the real-world experiences and identified needs and priorities of frontline healthcare staff and management and was co-designed based on the evidence for collective leadership and teamwork in healthcare. It has proven feasible to implement and effective in supporting teams to lead collectively to enhance safety culture. This intervention overview will be of value to healthcare teams and practitioners seeking to promote safety culture and effective teamworking by supporting teams to lead collectively.