ABSTRACT
There is in every disaster an awful sameness that makes comparison a somewhat depressing exercise. In one sense, this is a truism, which at the same time obscures important particularities. Nevertheless, in every case, contingent circumstances combine with a constellation of deeper underlying forces that propel events toward a catastrophic outcome. With hindsight, as every subsequent post-disaster inquiry monotonously reiterates, that outcome was far from inevitable. Yet, as events unfolded, there seemed little that could have halted the spiral to disaster. Whatever the immediate errors of judgement or circumstantial response to unforeseen events, the underlying systemic causes of failure meant that sooner or later, catastrophe was an inevitability. Such a “structuration of failure” requires explanation. It is here that analysis must probe beneath the contingent and immediate causes to examine the contested realms of the political economy of an industry, its relations with the state, the culture of its managerial practices, and its system of its industrial relations, and not least, the formation and deformation of its systems of regulatory oversight. Yet underlying predetermining factors, no matter how perverse their outcomes, must also acknowledge the role of human agency. Individual concrete corporate actors made individual decisions that raise questions of individual and corporate accountability. In the final reckoning, one enduring tension shapes and permeates the
ramified chain of circumstance and causation, a conflicted interrogative that is as pertinent today as when the question was first put on the agenda of sociological inquiry: safety or profit? (Nichols and Armstrong, 1973). The current chapter addresses this deceptively simple question in the context of the offshore oil industry.
