Re: [xmca] A Culture of Safety at Work

As I lurk here I am also reading (at Mike's suggestion) Wm H. Sewell's
"Logics of History" and just happen to be at a passage that offers some
direction when considering such embedded and interactive 'cultures' as
Helena describes. Sewell draws on Giddens and Sahlins to introduce
"precisely the right objects of theoretical investigation:
*structures,*which shape the world in their image;
* events*, which, although they are shaped by structures, transform the
structures that shaped them; a balky *world*, which is under no obligation
to behave as our categories tell us it should, and *subjects*, whose
interest and creative actions are the human stuff of events." ( top of pg
204) Sewell stresses the plurality of cultures, suggesting we not think
in terms of cultural schemas but of mutually reinforcing sets of cultural
schemas and material resources - and these are placed "emphatically in the
world of material practice." His discussions of structure (Giddens) and
event (Sahlins) are well worth the effort, and there is much more...

http://www.amazon.com/Logics-History-Transformation-Chicago-Practices/dp/0226749185/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200528868&sr=1-1

On Jan 16, 2008 3:47 PM, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> Its always difficult to interpret non-responses on XMCA, but the note that
> Helena sent in the middle
> of the culture discussion growing out of discussion of Andy's paper
> appears
> not to have been given
> much attention. Its a practical issue for Helena and for the workers and
> company involved.
>
> I sent the note re "web culture" in hopes of moving discussion in the
> direction of consideration
> of Helena's message, but also to doubtful effect.
>
> So, let me take a stab at being useful and thereby providing people
> another
> invitation to lend a hand.
>
> In my intermittent thinking about the question, my thoughts have returned
> often to the idea of "cultural
> styles" because, as in that literature, there appears to be a claim that
> there is some shared pattern of
> meaning and associated practices that apply, more or less, to condition
> all
> of the interactions among
> people in a common social group living in more or less common
> circumstances.
> "Culture of the classroom"
> and DIFFERENT "cultures of the classroom" may be at this level of
> generality. Perhaps "culture of machismo"
> in some societies or parts of societies?
>
> I also thought about the pilot's in Ed Hutchin's aircraft who have safety
> check lists and routines for going
> through them, and routines for ensuring that the routines are gone
> through,
> and rules about how to go
> through those routines, and sanctions for not going through those
> routines.
>
> A preliminary guess about how to talk about such group-specific, but
> presumably within-group pervasive
> phenomena in the case of a factory or workplace. In such cases culture
> refers to a combination of values
> and their associated practices which members recognize, recognize that
> others recognize them, and can be
> referred to with the expectation that they will be understood by others,
> so
> they are tools for constructing joint activity,
> a "shared reality." Gary Alan Fine in more elaborated treatments called
> this sort of cutlural system an idioculture.
>
> (Fine's definition can be interpreted a la Geertz, as an interpretive,
> idealistic approach to culture. This is not my
> reading; I prefer, a s n the parts of Geertz I use, to use it as a way
> to
> keep both material and ideal aspects of
> culture in mind).
>
>
> Perhaps this way of looking at things could prove useful, Helene. I got
> to
> thinking that if ALL that constituted the
>
> "Culture of the workplace" you were studying was safety, people would
> enter
> the building, sit down in a chair, and
>
> not move a muscle all day to be sure they were safe. Absurd, of course.
> They are engaged in productive activity
> and earning their livings, so they must, like Hutchin's pilots, do things
> that are not guaranteed safe. So as part
> of many of the practices constituitive of the particular activity system,
> safety is a value that gets included, with
> others, in what people do.
>
> If this is approximately correct, the place to start may be with the
> explicit practices where safety is named and
> included. And then work to ferret out implicit practices where it is
> present, although perhaps not explicitly
> named. And , passim Yrjo, look for the contradictions that arise when
> this value and its associated practices
> and shadings of practices conflict with other, co-existing cultural
> features of the setting.
>
> A glance at google suggests that there is a n existing literature
> applied
> to workplaces where some such approach
> as I am gesturing toward may live.
>
>
> mike
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-- 
Deborah Downing Wilson
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California San Diego
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