MA Cultural and Social Anthropology
Master Thesis
Report Activity in the Dutch Offshore Industry.
An Ethnographic Study on Organizational and Occupational Safety and
Health Culture.
Supervisor
Prof. Rob van Ginkel
MA Thesis of Walter Barbieri UVA ID: 11181133 Word-count: 23893 Amsterdam 27/02/2017
Introduction...4
Introduction to Oil and Gas Studies...5
Risk, Security and Offshore...8
Chapter 1 - Fieldwork Experience and Research Methods...11
Adapting to the Field...12
On Methods...16
Applied Anthropology...22
Chapter 2 - Incident-Report System ...23
Organisational and Occupational Safety and Health Culture...23
Incident-Report System...26
Bonus Reward ...29
Surveillance ...30
Blame Culture...32
Minor/Major Incidents and Injuries...34
Manipulation of the self-image...37
Peers Relations...38
Numbers Game...39
Paperwork...40
Enforcement of Safety Regulations...41
Chapter 3 - Safety Culture...43
Efficacy of Safety Culture...43
Cultural Change ...49
Consistency Between the Aim and the Outcome of Safety Culture...51
Personal Initiative and Procedures ...52
Attending a Basic Safety Training Course...56
Conclusions...60
Report Activity...60
Safety Culture...62
Bibliography ...65
Introduction
[t]his disaster took place aboard the North Sea oil platform, Piper Alpha, on the evening of July 6 1988 claiming the lives of 165 of the 226 persons on board and two of the crew of the fast rescue craft of the Sandhaven when it was engaged on rescue activities. The death toll was the highest in any accident in the history of offshore oil exploration. […] The immediate cause of the disaster was a failure in the permit to work system which caused a breakdown in communications between the day shift and the night shift. This led to the use of machinery which was undergoing maintenance and caused the escape of gas from an insecurely fastened temporary flange. Thereafter, there appeared to be a series of failures and errors of judgement which contributed to the overall scale of the disaster. Many of the men on board were unfamiliar with the layout of the platform and had not been trained properly in emergency procedures.
(Miller 1991: 176, 181) The present paper is about the organisational and occupational safety and health culture in the Dutch offshore industry and is based on three month fieldwork in Den Helder, in the North Holland province, as an intern at MediWerk. The main research question that motivated my research in the offshore industry was to understand the way workers cope with the incident-report system – an item within the safety culture – and, more specifically, why they would decide to not report incidents, accidents and near-misses. Secondary, I wanted to understand the way safety culture affects the workers behavior and if there was consistency between the aim and the outcome of safety culture.
The offshore industry is an hazardous one. Working on a platform in the middle of the sea, handling heavy machineries to drill the sea bottom and to extract dangerous materials, like oil and gas, are reasons themselves to set up a dangerous situation. A whole set of safety measures and procedures are in place in the industry in order to reduce risks and hazards, and eventually to prevent incidents to happen. The break of those rules and procedures might, obviously, elicit disastrous effects. There are many informal aspects, related to the industry, to the personnel and to the organisation of the work, that might affect the implementation of
safety and health, which are usually referred to as safety culture. The adoption of unsafe behavior, failures in the communication among workers and between the departments, the break of rules and procedures that are thought of as insignificant, are all seemingly negligible events that might accumulate up to produce unforeseen incidents. To understand the reasons why the workers of the offshore industry decide to not report incidents, accidents and near-misses would allow us to have better insights of the industry and its safety culture, and hopefully it will contribute to prevent future incidents.
To follow, I'll explain the theoretical reasons I decided to engage with my research. In the first chapter I'll provide an ethnographic description of my experience in the industry and I'll elaborate insights on research methods. In the second chapter I'll focus on the organisational and occupational safety and health culture in the offshore industry and I'll address the main research question that motivated the present research. In the third chapter I'll try to answer to the secondary research questions and to provide more general insights.
Introduction to Oil and Gas Studies
The extraction and production of oil and gas are massively expensive processes, which can be accomplished only by means of huge capitals. This is one of the main reasons why corporate organizations and multinational companies are the ones dealing in the industry. McGuire significantly delineated three features of the industry (McGuire 2006: 64, emphasis in the original): “Globalization is a convenient tag for the mobility of resources – natural, human, and capital – through the world. The corporate organization of capital has undergone marked changes in the last several decades of the 20th century, as stockholders have asserted
themselves as stakeholders. And the organization of work has been fundamentally altered”. Or as Sinclair puts it (Sinclair 2011: 1): “The development of the oil industry is a history of corporate concentration and globalization”. Corporate policies and safety regulations on the extraction sites are linked to national laws and the political orientation of governments, which implies a close connection of the industry with the politics of the states it operates in (Sinclair 2011; Tombs 1998; Collinson 1999).
National policies on energy are usually shaped on what is called energy security, which can be defined as “[e]nsuring a secure supply of energy at a price residents are able to pay”
(Sinclair 2011: 24). Energy security is based on energy supply, which in turn is based on the calculated reserves of oil. Many experts agree nowadays in what is called peak theory (Sinclair 2011; Rogers 2015; Bridge 2010; Hemmingsen 2010), following which the discovery of new extraction sites and the production of oil would eventually peak and then will start to decrease. This theory was proposed by Hubbert in 1956 (Hemmingsen 2010: 531), and the debate that followed it “has been a negotiation between competing interests and ideas, as it has been between competing disciplines and expertise” (ibid.: 532). The oil industry refused the theory until 1974, when almost all opposition disappeared and Hubbert's theory became widely accepted (ibid.: 537). Hemmingsen argues that “beyond a response to the material realities of declining production, industry support for Hubbert reflected the large oil firms' new interest in gaining subsidies to develop the country's non-conventional hydrocarbon resources” (ibid.). Even though there is agreement regarding the fact that oil production will peak at some point in the future, different opinions are held regarding the timing of the peak – when it will happen – its modalities and its consequences on availability of liquid fuels (Bridge 2010: 525). Disagreement is also about the data that are employed to calculate the reserves of oil, namely production trends, discovery trends, and finally the size of ultimate recoverable reserves (ibid.: 526). Bridge argues that, thanks to the increasing recognition of non-conventional sources of oil and a falling industrial demand for oil, “far from an 'end of the age of oil' and an ineluctable slide towards a post-oil future down peak oil's recessionary limb, the foreseeable future is likely to be dominated by an intensification of oil extraction, through a series of massive investments to bring unconventional oil reserves into production and extend the peak” (ibid.). Accordingly the “prospect that peak production may occur via a demand-side mechanism rather than supply is now being taken seriously by major oil exporters” (ibid.).
Production in the oil industry follows closely the oil's price fluctuation. The price of oil is determined by the law of demand and supply; yet oil companies play a great deal in determining the amount of supply. Geopolitical forces are involved as well in the determination of oil prices (Sinclair 2011; McGuire 2006). Bridge states that “First and foremost, peak oil is a proposition about a state of crisis in political-geological relations. […] critical limits to availability often do not lie within biophysical systems, but in the organization of production and consumption relations” (Bridge 2010: 527). Huber sustains
that scarcity is something that must be produced for the market and the price mechanism to function (Huber 2011: 817). Accordingly oil scarcity must be managed so that oil prices will be enough to make dizzying profits available. Following Huber, “[t]he oil market is beset by a struggle to find a balance between abundance and scarcity that both allows high enough prices for profitable accumulation and low enough prices to maintain levels of demand” (Huber 2011: 819).
The oil industry in particular is highly volatile (McGuire 2006: 79): “When prices or production declines, corporations reorganize. This happened during the 1980's; it occurred again in the late 1990's”. The reorganization of the oil and gas company is interesting in itself (ibid.: 76): “early in its development, the oil and gas industry pioneered many of the nonstandard employment relations now being scrutinized by social scientists”. The restructuring of the industry “set the conditions whereby banking and capital interests, rather than production, began to determine the strategies of the majors” (Austin 2006: 100); a main consequence of this reorganization is that “the industry became dominated in the 1990s by a principal strategy of independents: subcontracting” (ibid.: 101). This led in turn to a “shift of financial risk and liability from the oil companies to the contracting and service companies, and, within many of these, to the individual worker” (ibid.: 105).
Oil price peaked in 2008 and since then it has been dropping. The annual average crude oil price (with inflation adjusted to 2016) in 2008 was 102,00$, in 2015 was 42,53$ and, although estimates for the current year are partial, in 2016 is at 34,13$1. Historically oil price
was not so low since 2002. In accordance with what is argued above, I presumed that, given the historically low oil price, the situation of the offshore industry was critical, that oil companies and corporations were undergoing a phase of reorganisation, that the quality of work and job's conditions was worsening and that the shift of liability to the workers was increasing. Thus I considered valuable to study and make research in the offshore industry. Within this context, I assumed that safety culture and risk management would be the most affected by the low oil prices.
1 Online Source (17/12/2016):
Risk, Security and Offshore
For Giddens, risk is the defining feature of the post-industrial society (Giddens 1999: 3): “A risk society is a society where we increasingly live on a high technological frontier which absolutely no one completely understands and which generated a diversity of possible futures. […] it is a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk”. The author highlights a transition from external risk to what he defines manufactured risk, which is “risk created by the very progression of human development” and “refers to new risk environments for which history provides us with very little previous experience” (ibid.: 4). Risk management is also a political matter, if for no other reasons that risk “is always connected to responsibility” (ibid.: 7). Giddens states that “[t]he transition from external to manufactured risk is bringing about a crisis of responsibility, because the connections between risk, responsibility and decisions alter” (ibid.: 8). Douglas and Wildavsky argue that the perception of risk is primarily a social process (Douglas 1983), which works mainly through elision (ibid.: 8): “acting in the present to ward off future dangers, each social arrangement elevates some risks to a high peak and depresses others below sight. This cultural bias is integral to social organization”. The authors wish to move away the debate around risk and safety from the domain of nature and technology (ibid.: 64, 66): “If the question is about how much risk is acceptable, social as well as scientific answers are required. When only low levels of risks are allowed, feasible limits depend not on what nature will withstand, but on what people will stand for”. For the authors the core argument when evaluating risk is about establishing what is socially acceptable rather than establishing facts.
The issue of safety and security in the oil and gas industry, especially in the offshore sector, is one of major importance, given the risks inherent to the workplace in itself and the natural resources that are extracted. Nevertheless many argued that safety management is aimed mainly to avoid production interruptions caused by incidents and to protect shareholders investments (Tombs 1998; Collinson 1999; Appel 2012). Tombs and Whyte (Tombs 1998), analysing the effects of the Piper Alpha disaster on the regulation of risk and security offshore, argue that oil companies in the UK were able to enforce rules on safety attuned with their corporate interests and that didn't improve the security in the rigs (ibid.:
91,92): “CRINE [Cost Reduction Initiative for the New Era, a project promoted by UK Offshore Operators Associations] has established cost-cutting as a legitimate strategy and has created a number of serious threats to safety in the offshore industries. […] there has been little change in safety standards offshore since Piper Alpha”. Appel, drawing from her ethnographic work in Equatorial Guinea, suggests that “the transnational oil and gas industry in Equatorial Guinea is a modular capitalist project: a bundled and repeating set of technological, social, political, and economic practices aimed at profit making that the industry works to build wherever companies find commercially viable hydrocarbon deposits” (Appel 2012: 697).
Academic literature stresses the fact that the way safety and security are enforced, through an all-embracing safety culture and performance assessment, might produce contradictory effects regarding the activity of accidents and incidents reporting (Collinson 1999), mainly because of the bonus reward system. Workers wouldn't report minor incidents in order to not loose a part or the whole of their bonus. Blame culture and asymmetrical power relations are pointed at as other reasons for not reporting or downplaying incidents and injuries. From the first interview I conducted emerged that the reason why workers wouldn't report accidents is not primarily a financial one, but one related to the safety and security system itself: accidents and incidents reports would eventually produce an enforcement and exacerbation of the regulatory system, that would in turn lead to a worsening of the working life of the workers. Moreover the quantity of paperwork needed to report an accident was stated as the second hindrance to the security report system.
The present research is partially inspired by the work of Collinson on safety culture in the offshore industry (Collinson 1999). He argued that theories from Foucault and Goffman could be useful to better understand safety culture, surveillance, and the way the workers of the industry cope with those. For what regards Goffman on surveillance, his concept of presence is surely useful (Giddens 1984: 68): “What Goffman calls 'the full condition of co-presence' are found whenever agents 'sense that they are close enough to be perceived in whatever they are doing, including their experiencing the others, and close enough to be perceived in this sensing of being perceived”. Probably even more important for the present analysis is the concept of secondary adjustment (Goffman 1961: 54-55): “In total institutions
there will also be a system of what might be called secondary adjustments, namely, practices that do not directly challenge the staff but allow inmates to obtain forbidden satisfactions or to obtain forbidden one by forbidden means. […] Secondary adjustments provide the inmate with important evidence that he is still his own man, with some control over his environment...”. Collinson argued that “we can acknowledge the oppositional possibilities of IM [impression management] through concealment by combining Goffman's early emphasis on dramaturgical interaction with his later focus on secondary adjustments. […] Oil workers' survival strategies could therefore be seen as dramaturgical secondary adjustments” (Collinson 1999: 593). A main critic to the theory of Goffman is that “Goffman's analysis of encounters presumes motivated agents rather than investigating the sources of human motivation...” (Giddens 1984: 70). Foucault's theory had been criticized, on the other hand, because “...Foucault's bodies are not agents” (ibid.: 154). Collinson proposed a way to synthesize the theories of the two authors (Collinson 1999: 596): “By connecting surveillance, IM and secondary adjustments it may be possible to avoid the rather deterministic approach of recent Foucauldian studies, while also overcoming Goffman's tendency to underestimate issues of organizational power and conflict”.
Chapter 1 - Fieldwork Experience and Research Methods
I wake up at 5:40, get ready for the day, jump on my bike and ride it to the central station of Amsterdam – living in Amsterdam Noord, I have to take the ferry to reach the city centre – grab myself breakfast at an Italian chain store, get on the train at 7:12 towards Den Helder, a small town in the north of the North Holland province. Around 8:15 I get off the train at Anna Paulowna, a village situated approximately 15 km south of Den Helder. There I have to wait until 8:38 for the bus 158, which finally brings me to the Den Helder Airport, the estimated time of arrival 8:51. My fieldwork starts at 9:00, as agreed with MediWerk, the company I'm an intern at. Around midday I have lunch with the staff of the company, something as simple as a sandwich that we bring ourselves from home. Depending on my errands, I stay at the office until 15:00, 16:00 or 17:00. Then I go all the way back to my home – bus, train, ferry, bike – an itinerary that takes me around two and a half hours.
Above is a description of my average day of fieldwork, which I conducted for three days per week – usually Monday, Wednesday and Friday – during a period of three months, from June 13th until September 9th 2016. I commuted from my house in Amsterdam to Den Helder
for the whole period of the research. I tried for quite a long time to find an accommodation in the nearby area, but I couldn't find any place where to live, notwithstanding the help I received in looking for it from my colleagues and from my supervisor too. I carried out my fieldwork as an intern at MediWerk, a company specialised on health and safety management, health examinations, sustainable employability and absenteeism management, for the offshore and maritime industry. The company has four offices in The Netherlands; I spent my time in the office based at the airport of Den Helder. I established my cooperation with MediWerk during the period I was preparing my research. They were interested in my research, and willing to help me in carrying it out. Aside from the results of my research, they were happy to help a student and wanted to promote academic researches in the offshore industry. During my fieldwork I managed to receive the approval from the airport to cooperate with my research. The Den Helder Airport is mainly used as an heliport servicing the offshore industry. Helicopters fly towards the offshore platforms and back from them.
the surrounding area is quite the typical Dutch one, small houses, flat lands crossed by rivers and canals, farmed fields and a great variety of birds. It is a really peaceful and quiet countryside, really lovely during sunny and warm days. I developed the habit to take short strolls while I was waiting the bus or the train at Anna Paulowna's train station. Approaching the area called De Kooy, where both the company and the airport are located, the landscape turns into an industrial one. There are mainly warehouses, offices, onshore oil and gas refineries and other industrial buildings. Most of the industry there is related to the airport, the offshore and maritime industry, and the navy. De Kooy is situated in the outskirts of Den Helder, south-east from the city centre. The North Holland province is a large peninsula, Den Helder is on the top of this peninsula, so the area where I conducted my research is surrounded on three sides by the sea, the North Sea and the Wadden Sea. North of Den Helder lie the Frisian Islands, the closest of which is Texel.
Adapting to the Field
On the train headed towards my first day of fieldwork, as I was feeling that very common sense of excitement for the new experience I was about to start mixed with some anxiety, I got my self ready for the day to come. I was going through my notes, check the interview's list of questions I prepared beforehand, and so on. I had a shower in the morning, and I dressed up quite well, not too formal, not too informal either. I had a light blue shirt and a blue suit jacket, jeans, leather shoes and a leather jacket – it's usually chilly early in the morning in the Netherlands, even during the summer season. I caught the train at 8:12, the first day I start at 10:00; I arrived at the office a few minutes earlier. The company's offices are in a building next to the Den Helder Airport. I had been to MediWerk once before, when I went to discuss with them about my research and the possibility of me being an intern there. The bus drops you in front of the airport. The Den Helder Airport is mainly used as an heliport servicing the offshore industry. Helicopters fly towards the offshore platforms and back from them. Leaving the airport behind you, on the right there is a big company building, and on the left there are some airport's facilities and parking lots for the employees of the offices. In front of the airport, at the other side of the little taxi square, there are the airport's parking lots on the right and the building, where MediWerk is, on the left. The company is at the first floor, as you reach the top of the stairs, on the right; there are two other companies in the
same floor, which are related to the offshore industry and are in a good working relationship with MediWerk. The building has a rectangular shape, the offices are mainly located on the exterior side, facing outwards, and a hall connects them all; on the interior side there are the stairs, the elevators, and some shared facilities, as toilets and kitchens. As you get into the company you find yourself in a hall, there is the shared kitchen on the right, and on the left an emergency exit, followed by the conference room and next to it the waiting room; in the waiting room there is the automatic coffee machine, and from there you have access to the doctor's office. In front of you there is the physician assistant's office and as you turn right following the hall, there are two offices on the left side, the toilets and elevators on the right side. In those two offices work the rest of the staff, usually four people, five adding myself.
Mohamed, one of the owners of the company, came to greet me, showed me the offices and introduced me to the staff. That morning at the office there were Marteen, the physician of the company, Jeroun, office manager, and Mohamed. The boss (Mohamed) offered me a coffee and we had a brief chat. He explained me that I would share the room with him for the time being. So I had the pleasant surprise to have a personal desk in the office, with a lot of space to work on my research. Later Bianca, the health manager, and Mariska, back office, arrived. The first impression I had was that it was a friendly and informal environment. They were really nice with me from the beginning, and I am thankful for that. I talked with them about safety and health, sustainable employability, risk assessment and education, and asked them about their job. They provided me with a couple of articles and questionnaires that they thought would be useful for my research – those that were in Dutch were translated in English, when necessary, by Bianca. As I told them I was having troubles finding an accommodation in the nearby area, they decided they would try to help me out. Then I sat at my desk and read some of the materials they gave me. The activity in the office was quite busy and jobs were mainly carried out in Dutch, so observation for me was quite an hard task. At 13:15 we had lunch in the conference room; I had my own home-made sandwich, and so the others. During the lunch, which we consumed quite fast, we had some chat about my research, the offshore industry and the company. The weather that day was awful – something I had to get used to, I realized soon – and the helicopters' noise was the only sound coming from the outside; the radio was broadcasting not too loud music through the offices. As I gladly noticed, nobody made a fuss nor questioned my presence at the company, nor the
reasons for me being there; on the contrary, they were wilful to cooperate with me. We agreed that I would have gone to the office the following day instead of the day after, in order to meet the physician assistant, Jousei, and follow her during her job. At 15:00 Mohamed brought me to Alkmaar – a city closer to Amsterdam on my way back home, where he lives with his family – by car, so we had a chance to talk and get to know each other better. There I caught my train to Amsterdam and concluded my first day of fieldwork, which I considered positive overall.
To pay respect to an anthropological convention, I decided to start my account with my arrival story in the field (Pratt 1986). Yet, to carry out fieldwork in organisations and industrial environment is quite atypical. As Krause-Jensen explains (Krause-Jensen 2010: 5): “the anthropologist, who studies organisations, is likely to study 'up'; i.e. studying people who earn more, have a higher social standing, and are probably more self-conscious than the participant-observer. Furthermore, one might add, organisations are in some sense more clearly bounded than most other locations. It is necessary to get permission from high standing employees to get access to the locality and to do research”. My research partly falls within the field of applied anthropology. It does so because of its form – I had an internship contract with a company – and because of its content – I wanted to study and understand a job-related problem within an industrial environment. To do research within an industrial environment, even more in a working place, is a peculiar activity on its own. As I will show, I adopted a series of techniques to adjust myself to such an environment.
To be honest, I didn't bring my laptop with me the first day, something that puzzled the staff at the company. It was a faux pas, and not only because how much useful a pc is to do research: as I realized from the first day, my idea of research – the ethnographer, going around to annoy people with my notebook and a device to tape interviews at hand – differed from their own – a project based research, work on your pc and collect data. That implied, broadly speaking, that I had to come to terms with the fact that I was doing research in a working environment. To be clear, at MediWerk I always had the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do, to choose my line of research and act on my own. What I mean is that, doing research in a working environment, I had to behave in order to not become an hindrance to the job, which could have backfired because it could create strains with colleagues and because it could
undermine my capability for observations (Emerson et al. 2011: 22). In other words, I had to find my own place and role within the company and within the industry. As I already had the place, the main thing I struggled to adjust myself to was my own role, to build up a façade that would fit in the industry, that would help me in my research and would be in line with my own personality. I had to build my authority as a researcher and as an ethnographer.
The issue I had to face in order to get in contact with the workers of the offshore industry is related on one hand to a cautious – at times suspicious – behaviour towards people not working in the industry; on the other hand, to the fact that people working in the industry are actually working – and they do not appreciate to be interrupted while doing their job – or are waiting to depart for a two weeks shift on a rig – and are not in the best mood to interact. The way I handled my own presence in the industry regards mainly appearances. First of all I'd like to talk about dress-code. I decided to dress up slightly different from my everyday outfit. I wanted to be elegant but not too much, retain a somehow casual style but more formal. I usually wore a suite jacket over a shirt – no neck tie – jeans, leather shoes, a leather jacket because of the cold weather, sometime a wrist watch, always my dark blue sunglasses. My dress-code image manipulation was mainly addressed to the workers of the offshore industry, who are the subjects of my research, but also helped me out with my colleagues at the company. The image of myself I was trying to convey was that of a young professional. Workers of the offshore industry do not really mind about formality and dress-code, at least while they are at their job, but I felt that I was being taken more seriously because of my outfit. As I considered such an outcome positive, I decided to adopt a dress-code, while conscious of the possible drawback of this practical method: given the reflexive and interpersonal nature of the ethnographic enterprise (Strathern 1987; Aunger 1995; Clifford and Marcus 1986), playing with my own image would have had effects on the way I elicited answers from my respondents. As O'Reilly puts it (O'Reilly 2005: 113): “It is accepted that an interviewer's attitude, facial expression, responses, even gender, may affect the outcome of the interview and especially the replies given by the respondent”.
Dress-code is not the only appearance-related thing I employed to convey formality and professionalism. Apart from observation and participation, I carried out many interviews and a survey. I employed a standardized form both for the survey and for the interviews, in order
to carry them out in a more fashionable way and to help myself during the research and the data-gathering process. I made the questionnaire with a free-to-use internet based program, which I chose over others because of the nice and clean interface it offered. The questionnaire is divided in three sections and contains thirty-one questions, for a total of five pages. The interview form is divided in two parts, one for the personal data, that I let the interviewed fill in (I had a couple of issues with Dutch names' transcription), while the other comprises the interview questions. I selected eight questions, of which five are open-ended and three are close-ended. I left a blank space after each question where I could jot down impressions and take notes. Thus my ordinary interaction with the workers of the industry was to introduce myself and the topic of my research, ask for cooperation to fill in the questionnaire, then ask whether or not they would like to follow it up with an interview. As I received the consent to proceed with the questionnaire or the interview, I used to take out from my folder one or more of the necessary printed form, give them to the respondents and let them read the contents. My research was totally overt (O'Reilly 2005: 60), so I explained to each one of those people I interacted with the reason of my research and the methods I employed in order to conduct it, and ensured them their anonymity.
On Methods
Probably the most intimate reason I had to attend this master was that I wanted to carry out fieldwork. I wanted so because, after a bachelor in anthropology which included no fieldwork and had so much reading into ethnography, ethnographic production and field methods, I really wanted to do the thing. As I developed my research project during the course of the lectures, my interest towards the fieldwork experience itself and ethnographic methodologies never faded away. Something I wanted to address was the ever existing debate around qualitative and quantitative methods (Aunger 1995; O'Reilly 2005). As Aunger states (Aunger 1995: 97): “There are two basic analytical approaches in social sciences. The first, using formal methods (e.g standard statistical analysis), aggregates over the attributes of individual cases to determine the influence of abstract effects on events. This approach, which results in correlations between variables, is unable to provide adequate causal explanations for what happens in particular cases. The interpretive or narrative approach in contrast, aggregates over events to trace the causal development of a single case. This type of analysis cannot be made
reflexive (i.e., cannot account explicitly for the intersubjective nature of data collection procedures in human studies). Thus each method, by itself, is problematic”. O'Reilly characterizes such a dualism as an opposition between a positivist approach and an interpretative approach (O'Reilly 2005: 114): “generally the quantitative researcher is hoping to collect quantifiable data, facts, truths – tangible data which can be collected, logged, sorted, compared, generalized and analyzed. […] In order to collect such data it is important to ensure standardization of techniques, to control for interviewer bias, and to have a large, representative sample. […] In the interpretative tradition it is accepted that human societies cannot be studied in the same way as the natural sciences. […] Interpretive, qualitative sociologists stress the importance of the quality of the data they collect over the quantity, and so they move away from pseudo-scientific interviewing techniques”. I'd like to make clear the point that it is not, and was never, my intention to provide an answer to the aforementioned debate nor to take a stance in it. I was just genuinely interested in trying out different methodologies and see with my own eyes the difference in replies those methods were eliciting; I was also interested in experiencing myself the pros and cons linked to the use of such methods. Being my educational background rooted in anthropology, I was mainly educated in qualitative approaches. So, because of disciplinary affiliation, I would say that my bias as a researcher leans towards an appreciation of qualitative methods and outcomes.
A similar distinction can be found in organisational studies. The European Agency for
Health and Safety at Work's 2011 report distinguishes between three different approaches
within organisational studies (EU-OSHA 2011: 5, 22, 25, 26): “the academic, analytical and pragmatic approach. […] the analytical or psychological/psychometric approach is the most popular and predominant approach in safety culture assessment, and focuses specifically on organizational safety climate. Safety climate is assessed/measured by conducting questionnaire surveys among a group of workers in an organization. […] [The academic approach] is a descriptive approach, meaning that it seeks to describe and understand safety culture rather than judging it. […] For this purpose, specific data collection methods are used that are based on, or at least 'inspired by', anthropological and sociological research. This implies that required data and information are collected through 'fieldwork' in the whole organization, using techniques such as observation, document analysis and interviews. […] In this [pragmatic] approach the focus is on assessing an organisation's current state of maturity
regarding safety culture, giving it a ranking on a predefined 'cultural maturity ladder' that shows different levels or stages of cultural maturity. […] The pragmatic approach is thus future-oriented and prescriptive (normative) as opposed to descriptive”. I definitely find myself in agreement with the author of the report on the insight that “None of them should however be seen as being the one and only, true approach. […] Rather, a multi-method and holistic approach should be taken towards safety culture. This approach, using multiple strategies, is also called triangulation” (ibid.: 27).
My fieldwork, being atypical because carried out as an intern within an industrial environment, is also atypical because it differs from the usual research carried out in organisational studies. Even though I was an intern at MediWerk, I didn't make a research on the company's organisational or safety culture. The main reason of my internship there was to get in contact with the workers of the offshore industry, possibly of the maritime industry and the navy too. The second reason was to observe the work done at a company servicing the offshore industry, in order to gain insights of the industry itself. Finally, as they were willing to cooperate with my research, I had the extreme luck to have access to their knowledge, information and network of professional acquaintances. The aim of my research is about the organisational and occupational safety and health culture of the offshore industry, more specifically on the Incident-Report procedure, and the subjects of my research are the workers of the offshore industry. Unfortunately I couldn't have access to an offshore platform; two main issues can be identified as the sources of the problem I encountered: the unwillingness of oil companies to have me on board – the declining economic trend of the industry in the Netherlands and the relatively global low price of oil on the world market make the situation harsher – and the safety culture enforced in the offshore industry. Eventually to even set foot on a rig you are required to have a safety certificate, which is time-consuming to obtain and extremely expensive.
Clients come at MediWerk mainly to do their medical examination and obtain the health certificate they are required to work. The number of people coming to the office on a daily basis vary, but it could be estimated between three and fifteen. Each medical examination lasts around thirty minutes. The examination is similar to a regular check-up. It consists of tests on: blood pressure, height, weight, eye-sight, hearing, blood test and urine test when
required, lung capacity (spirometry), resting ECG (electrocardiogram) and exercise ECG. The examination is carried out by the physician and the physician's assistant. I had the chance to distribute questionnaires and interview people before or after their examination.
During the first month of fieldwork, I mainly worked on document analysis, followed the job in the office, searched for academic and non-academic literature through the company's professional network, tried to re-educate myself, prepared the questionnaire of the survey in cooperation with the staff at the company, get in contact with other companies and professionals. During that period I interviewed two safety professionals working for other companies, and consequently I decided to devise an interview form to carry them out in a more fashionable way, so to align my methodology with my dress-code. The 13th of July I
finished preparing the questionnaire and the interview form and received the approval on them from the company's manager. The same day I sent a formal request to the airport of Den Helder to cooperate with my research. The 15th of July I started the survey, which lasted until
the last day of fieldwork. At the end of the month I received the approval from the airport to cooperate with my research. We agreed that I could stay within the airport premises, distribute questionnaires and interview the passengers waiting to board on the helicopters. Since the 1st
of August, I started to spend part of my time at the airport located next to the company. The first time I went to the airport to make research, I went through the security check, I provided them with my ID card, and received a visitor badge. After the first time I've not been asked for my ID card anymore, but I had to show up at the security check point in order to get my badge (which I have to hand back before leaving). The 19th of August I observed a Basic Safety
Training refreshment course at FMTC, a company based at Schiphol Airport. I managed to obtain their cooperation through the help of my colleagues at MediWerk. I spent there a whole day observing the training. A Basic Safety Training last at least three days; a refreshment course is attended by those who already did their Basic Safety Training, and have to renew their certificate, by law, every four years. A refreshment course lasts one day and covers all the topics that are dealt with in the Basic Safety Training. The 9th of September was the last
day of my fieldwork. I received a gift from my colleagues at MediWerk and we had a cake. I went to say goodbye to the staff of the airport and to thank them. Finally, at 3:00 pm I had my last research appointment at Multi Metaal, a company located nearby the airport of Den Helder, where I had a meeting with their safety manager. The 24th of October I gave a
presentation at MediWerk about the results of the survey.
I spent between 226 and 264 hours doing research, the former number referring to the hours I spent at the company and at the airport, the second comprising also the time spent doing research outside the agreed schedule at the company. Eventually I spent approximately 160 hours commuting. Since public transport in the Netherlands are as efficient as they are expensive, commuting was the main expenditure of my fieldwork, around one-hundred Euro per week. I collected sixteen recorded interviews and three not recorded interviews. The ones not recorded were so because of the interviewed will; the only woman I was able to interview didn't want me to tape our interview. I had a brief group interview with four Spanish men; I didn't tape the group interview because those men couldn't speak English, while I can roughly understand Spanish, and as such we ended up talking partially in Spanish and partially in Italian (my own first language). At the beginning of my fieldwork, I agreed with MediWerk that I would have carried out a survey in cooperation with them, regarding risk assessment and sustainable employability in the offshore industry. I collected more than two-hundred questionnaires, of which 160 were considered valid.
As I stated at the beginning of the paragraph, I purposely engaged my fieldwork with different methodologies and approaches. I preferred not to stick to a single method first of all because of the curiosity I had in trying out different research methods. The fact itself that I was not carrying out a research on a company, but on the whole industry, was another reason that led me to such decision. Notably direct observation of the phenomena I wanted to study was precluded to me – I had no access to an offshore platform; as such, I felt the necessity to gather all the possible kinds of data that seemed useful to me. Eventually the use of a survey to make research in a working and industrial environment is definitely useful. First of all the results of a survey are meant to provide statistical data, which allows for generalization and comparison. Being aware of the limits of such a method, I didn't want to preclude myself the possibility of having access to such a source of information. Carrying out a survey had also the upside, for me, to give meaning to my presence in the field. Workers were accepting my role and presence at the company, at the airport, and in other workplaces because they felt that carrying out a survey as a researcher and as an intern was a befitting activity. An interesting fact is that workers of the offshore industry are accustomed to questionnaires and surveys
because of the safety culture enforced on their workplace, which makes large use of such techniques. Apart from motivating my presence on the field, the survey usually served as a starting point to arrange possible interviews, as I was interacting with tens of people on a daily basis. Finally, those issues and points that surfaced as unclear, puzzling or critical from the survey were pursued during interviews.
I employed semi-structured interviews (O'Reilly 2005: 116) during my research. The interview form I prepared was meant to help me during the interview and to give a formal impression to the respondents. To follow predetermined questions has the effect of conveying a sort of standardization to the interview process, which is not exactly the outcome I wanted to pursue. I usually followed the form in order to be sure to ask all the relevant questions that I was interested in; at the same time I felt free to follow the discussion lead and let the respondents to develop their arguments. The main practical issue I had with handling too unstructured, or informal, interviews is related to time: most of my respondents were quite in a hurry, whether because they were actually working, because their helicopter was due to depart, because they had to catch the airplane from Amsterdam to go back to their own countries, or more simply because they just came back from a two-week shift and couldn't wait to finally go home. As I already stated, workers of the offshore industry are accustomed to questionnaires, forms to fill and formal interviews, because those methods are part of the safety culture enforced on their workplace. Many of my respondents expected from me concise and close-ended questions, a way of doing interviews much similar to a questionnaire, even though I made clear before the beginning of the interview that the data I was looking for was of a qualitative kind, that I was interested in their opinion. Employing such interview form allowed me to follow an ethnographically based interview style, while presenting the interview process and format in a way familiar to my respondents. A noticeable thing I was struck by is the difference in responses and attitudes I observed between the company and the airport. At the company people felt compelled to cooperate, at least to fill in the questionnaire or to leave their email address for further cooperation. At the airport I noticed a quite widespread reluctance, or unwillingness, to participate in the survey and to be interviewed; obviously that vary according to the day and the people I had the chance to interact with.
Applied Anthropology
As I already mentioned, my research partially falls within the field of applied anthropology. Van Willigen defines applied anthropology as “a complex of related, research-based, instrumental methods which produce change or stability in specific cultural systems through provision of data, initiation of direct action, and/or formation of policy” (Van Willigen 2002: 10). Broadly speaking, applied anthropology has three products, or domains of application: information, policy and action. In these terms, my research mainly deals with information and with policy.
The domain of information includes the collection of data through various research methods, the theoretical background through which I selected and determined the area of my research, and the final interpretation of raw data.
The domain of policy includes the aim and focus of my research. I went to the field with the intention of evaluating the effects of the implementation of a policy, the incident-report system, and more generally to assess the efficacy of safety culture.
Chapter 2 - Incident-Report System
The main aim of my research is about organisational and occupational safety and health culture in the offshore industry. More specifically, I wanted to study the way people cope with the Incident-Report system, a procedure followed within safety culture.
Safety and security are an outstanding feature of the offshore industry. Given the hazard of the working place and the materials that are extracted, risks are sought to be reduced through an all-embracing safety culture. Academic literature stresses the fact that the way safety and security are enforced, through an all-embracing safety culture and performance assessment, might produce contradictory effects regarding the activity of accidents and incidents reporting (Collinson 1999), mainly because of the bonus reward system. Workers wouldn't report minor incidents in order to not loose a part or the whole of their bonus. Contradictory effects could also be produced by the asymmetrical power relations and blame culture which are in place in the offshore industry (Collinson 1999: 592): “...many company and contract workers experienced performance assessment as a form of managerial surveillance. A significant number of these employees sought to cope with corporate surveillance by concealing and/or downplaying incidents”.
As I will proceed to show, from my research emerged that more reasons than the one mentioned above proved to be critical with regards to the incident-report system.
Organisational and Occupational Safety and Health Culture
During the 1970s and 1980s management studies turned their attention to the informal aspects of organisations. Anthropological theories were employed, especially Geertz's, in management studies “to argue for managers' generating a single vision for the organization, implemented from the top, so as to align all the informal structures and practices of all departments into one 'web of meaning' or corporate culture” ( Krause-Jensen, Wright 2015: 347). Anthropologists felt at the time, and still feel, disconcerted and uneasy by such a free use of their concepts. As Krause-Jensen and Wright put it (ibid.: 347): “In the 1980s, when the culture concept (in the sense of shared values and behavior among a group of homogeneous people) was just becoming the greatest conceptual export success in the history of anthropology, anthropologists had already turned their back on it”. There is no consensus on
the operationalisation of the concept of organisational culture. As a matter of fact, being the concept of organisational culture an abstract one, researchers share a great degree of freedom regarding how to understand it and to put it in practice. Guldenmund, in a review of different models and approaches to safety culture, concludes that “the models on safety culture are unsatisfactory to the extent that they do not embody a causal chain but rather specify some broad categories of interest and tentative relationship between those” (Guldenmund 2010: 42). He defines organisational culture as a “relatively stable, multidimensional, holistic, construct shared by (groups of) organisational members that supplies a frame of reference and which gives meaning to and/or is typically revealed in certain practices” (Guldenmund 2010: 21).
Edgard Schein, considered the doyen of organisational culture (Krause-Jensen, Wright 2015: 348), developed a three-tiered model of culture as artifacts, espoused values and basic assumptions (Schein 2010). He defines the culture of a group “as a pattern of shared basics assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptability and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” (ibid.: 18). Schein's is an onion-like model of culture, where basic assumptions represent the core of culture, artifacts are the outer layer of it and and espoused values stand in between those two. Artifacts comprise the tangible, visible and verbally identifiable elements in an organisation. Espoused values include the aspects stated or aspired to by the organisation (EU-OSHA 2011: 14; Schein 2010: 25). Basic assumptions are defined as “the implicit assumptions that actually guide behavior, that tell the group members how to perceive, think about, and feel about things” (Schein 2010: 28). Basic assumptions are implicit, invisible and cannot be directly accessed. They can be discovered through the outer layers, and more specifically through the inconsistencies between artifacts and espoused values.
In organisational studies, the term organisational triangle refers to three main components of an organisation and its activities: structure, processes and culture (EU-OSHA 2011: 9). Organisational structure is about the formal aspects of an organisation; organisational processes refer to the core business activities and supporting processes in an organisation; organisational or corporate culture “applies more to the informal aspects of work and organising” and “is often described as 'the way we do things here'” (ibid.: 10). The aim of risk
prevention, organisational and occupational safety and health is to invest and protect in the human capital of an organisation - to put it another way, is about people and preventing them from harm. Organisational and occupational safety and health culture is about how an organization's informal aspects influence the occupational safety and health in a positive or negative way (ibid.: 11). The term safety culture was first used after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. A poor safety culture was pinpointed as one of the causes and contributing factors of the incident (ibid.: 14). The committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installation's definition of safety culture states: “the safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, competencies and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation's safety and health programmes” (ibid.: 13). Anyway there is a lack of consensus on the way safety culture should be understood. Guldenmund defines safety culture as”those aspects of an organisational culture which will impact on attitudes and behavior related to increasing or decreasing risk” (Guldenmund 2010: 51).
The core idea behind safety culture is to find and demonstrate a link between the organisational and occupational safety and health culture of an organisation and its safety performance. To be more precise, “The underlying idea is that by enforcing and enhancing an organisation's safety culture – assuming that this is feasible – worker's behaviour, compliance and participation […] would be influenced positively, eventually leading to a higher level of safety in an organisation” (UE-OSHA 2011: 16). According to the organisational triangle model, structure, processes and culture are intertwined, are acting upon each other and are operating at the same time on the members of the organisation. By setting values, norms and beliefs by which workers evaluate, deal with or disregard risks and enforcing conventions for behavior, interaction and communication, the organisational and occupational safety and health culture is sought to be influenced and improved.
Guldenmund defines attitudes as “psychological tendencies that are expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor” (Guldenmund 2010: 41). Attitudes are always directed towards an object; they are preceded by cognitive, affective or behavioural processes and elicit cognitive, affective or behavioural responses. Guldenmund compares attitudes to the second layer of culture in Schein's model, that of espoused values.
Safety attitudes can be directed towards countless (safety) objects. Guldenmund outlines four broad categories of safety objects: hardware/physical environment, software, people and behavior (ibid.: 48). Hardware is about the infrastructure, personal protection equipment and safety measures. Safety procedures and training fall within the software category. Safety attitudes towards people encompass all the different people and groups that can be distinguished within a company. Safety attitudes towards behavior include all those acts related to safety like responsibility, safe behavior, communication.
Incident-Report System
On an offshore platform, as I was informed by all my respondents, there are procedures to abide by virtually for everything. Procedures in general belong to the safety category previously defined as software. The Incident-Report system is one of those procedures enforced in the offshore industry. Following an incident, an accident or a near miss, workers have to report the event. The way the reports are issued, the people involved in it, as well as the procedures to comply with, vary in the industry, according to different companies or operators.
Before starting a job offshore, workers need a work permit, that is issued by the permit-holder, the safety supervisor or the production management. The first step is to go on the work site, check the area, make an assessment of the job that needs to be done, of the potential hazards, and of the safety measures that have to be followed. The work permit contains the work instructions, the actions that are going to be carried out, the procedures to follow in order to carry out those actions in safety, and the countermeasures to take in case of an accident. The workers and the permit-holder discuss the job together and decide for a plan of action. The time needed to obtain a permit to work varies, depending on the platform, and can go from ten or fifteen minutes up to an hour and a half. If a dangerous situation arises or new risks are determined, workers have the right and obligation to interrupt the job, make a reassessment of the risks and procedures to follow. Depending on the seriousness of the problem or of the risk, the work permit is changed on the location by the workers themselves or a stop card is issued. The stop card is sent to the production offices or to the safety supervisor, and an investigation follows up. Eventually, if the job can proceed, a new work permit is prepared.
In case an incident, accident or near miss happens, workers have the duty to make a report. Depending on the seriousness of the event, the report can be issued right after the event or after several hours. Virtually everything that happens while performing a job that is not in line with the work permit should be reported. This includes damages to the PPE (personal protective equipment), damages or hazards in the infrastructures, malfunctioning of the machineries, unsafe behaviour, near misses and minor injuries, and obviously major incidents and injuries. Usually an investigation follows the report. The problem reported is analytically approached according to the categories mentioned above (hardware, software, people and behavior), and the causes of the problem determined. If such a problem is recurring often, then proper actions are taken in order to avoid it. The data obtained through the process are used to process safety indicators and to assess a company's or contractor's safety performance (IOGP 2015).
The core idea behind the incident-report system is that through an efficient vertical communication, incidents and accidents cannot only be reduced, but also prevented. Enforcing, and forcing, communication through the report activity has the objective of promoting an horizontal approach to the management of risk and safety. Attitudes towards safety are expected to be proactive; safe behavior and concern towards safety are promoted. Safety trainings are mandatory for the workers of the offshore industry. One of the objectives of these trainings is to make aware the workers themselves of the dangers and risks that surround them, and how to act in safety in order to reduce those risks. In this sense safety, security and health should come in the first place from the workers themselves, from the daily activities and from a safe attitude towards safety. As new risks arise with the introduction of new technologies and procedures (Douglas 1983), a proactive attitude towards safety and security is deemed essential. Risks, hazards and dangers are monitored by the workers and the safety supervisors, and through the report activity are communicated to the management, that can then take proper organisational responses. In the case of multinational companies, the final report resulting from the incident- report activity is sent world-wide to all the branches of the company, problems are discussed in meetings of the various safety departments, and standardized organisational responses and procedures are envisioned. Through the report activity the safety performance of the workers, of the management, and of the platform as a whole is assessed. The subtle difference in this case between communication and performance
assessment is quite problematic. As I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph, on an offshore platform there is a procedure for everything, and workers have the duty to abide by those procedures and rules. At the same time workers' attitude towards safety is expected to be proactive and personal initiative aimed at promoting a safer and healthier workplace encouraged2.
Finally, in many platforms the system of the safety cards is in place. Safety cards are employed to report all kinds of things related to safety, but not directly linked to incidents or injuries. As I already mentioned, policies vary greatly depending on the platform, the contractor or the company. Where this procedure is in place, safety cards are required from the workers whether on a daily or on a weekly basis. The content of safety cards can be about the unsafe placement of tools, unsafe behavior of members of the crew, safety observations, risk and hazard prevention. All the kind of reports mentioned above are usually anonymous, so as to promote the report activity and enhance communication and trust between the workers and the management.
As I already mentioned, I approached the field with the intention of understanding the way workers cope with the incident-report system and the reasons why they would decide to not report. Workers' decision to not report in this context creates an hindrance to the safety culture itself, as communication partially breaks down and the safety system looses part of its efficacy in reducing and preventing risks. Academic literature stresses the problematic of the reward system and of blame culture as hindrances to the report activity. From my first interviews emerged that the enforcement of safety regulations – mainly on tools and equipments – and paperwork are considered hindrances to the report system.
From the survey that I conducted emerged that, out of all the reports issued, around the 6-8% are related to major incidents or injuries. This data is in line with the incident-report system and main aim of safety culture of promoting communication.
Time Span N° Accidents and
Injuries N° Reports Ratio (Accident/Report)
1 Year 25 (0,16p.p.3) 409 (2,66p.p.) 6,11%
Whole Career 323 (2,10p.p.) 4053 (26,49p.p.) 7,97%
To follow, I'll describe and analyse the different reasons pointed at by the workers to motivate the decision to not engage with the report system.
Bonus Reward
It was argued that linking safety performance to economic rewards could create contradictory effects regarding the report activity. Those rewards are mainly in the form of the appraisal system (performance of individuals is yearly assessed and bonus on wage is assigned based on the results of the performance) and of collective incentives (bonus is assigned to the whole crew based on the crew's collective performance) (Collinson 1999: 586). Workers would conceal or downgrade accidents and injuries in order to protect their wages and that of their colleagues.
As I had to find out myself, this kind of monetary reward system is not in place any more, at least in the North Sea. CiCi, a young Dutch man, who had been working in the offshore industry for an year and half in the demolition sector, when asked about the bonus reward system, replied: “ I can't tell, because for me it isn't. And I don't know how other people make their money or if they have to do productive things to make more money, and if they do less productive things they earn less money”4. Nowadays bonuses are based on the quantity and/or
the quality of the reports issued, and not in their lack. On some drilling platforms the Lost
Time Accident Record is still in use, which provides to the whole crew a yearly bonus based
on how well they performed, but such a method is slowly disappearing. Out of all my respondents, only Jim, a Dutch welder and fitter in an drilling rigs, mentioned the bonus based on safety performance. As he ironically pointed out, “on drilling rigs they support you...to work safe. So after one year in safety, you get presents”.
As already mentioned reports are mainly anonymous; in many cases, you are not only supported, but also compelled to fill in a certain number of safety reports and safety cards on a daily/weekly basis. This method should reduce workers' anxiety when engaging with the 4 I provided the transcription of the interviews as accurately and literally as my capabilities allowed me. I did
so in order to preserve the meaning my informants wanted to convey at the time the interviews took place. Since neither me nor most of my informants are native English speakers, the language of the interviews might appears as odd and at times there might be improper use of the grammar and of the syntax. I employed anonymity to protect my respondents' identity. All the personal names I will employ in the thesis are
report activity. At the same time it also gives rise to another problematic, that of number games; I'll come back to this point later in the chapter. Some companies and contractors also provide their employees a training on how to use and fill in reports. Depending on the platform and the company, reports can be on paper format or digital. Bonuses and rewards are assigned on the basis of the quantity and the quality of the reports. As Nomad, a British rig-logistic coordinator, explained “When people make very detailed observations, it's rewarded. Yeah, so reporting is the rewarded activity”.
The appraisal systems and collective incentives based on safety performance are not employed any more by the majority of companies and contractors. Accordingly, the problematic arising from linking safety performance to economic appraisal is hardly mentioned by the workers of the industry, nor it is considered as an hindrance to the report system.
Surveillance
It was argued that asymmetrical power relations and blame culture could be an hindrance to the report activity. Foucauldian studies critically approached the way management employed the concept of culture and corporate culture. Many authors sustain that “through measurement and assessment, surveillance systems render individuals calculable and even confessional selves, who collude in their own subordination” (Collinson 1999: 581). Collinson, in an article about a company's safety culture and its incident-report system, although being critical of Foucauldian theories, concluded that workers experience performance assessment as a form of surveillance, and that “a significant number of employees sought to cope with corporate surveillance by concealing or downplaying incidents. […] the managerial objective of creating disciplined selves can unintentionally construct employees as calculating, oppositional selves. Subscribing to an economically instrumental orientation to work, offshore workers refuse to be reduced to calculable, confessional and/or capitulated selves” (ibid.: 592-594). From this point of view, workers decision of not reporting would be an act of resistance, carried out to maintain a certain image of the self or, to put it in other words, for each of them to be his own man.
