ABSTRACT
Modern approaches to risk, crisis and disaster management give pre-eminence to expert knowledge and the formal state apparatus of disaster response and recovery. Complex socio-technical systems are risky because their operation and performance is dependent upon many interdependent factors. Such systems emerge from a process of heterogeneous engineering, the purposeful assembly of technological, social, economic and political elements to meet some predetermined goal. In congruence with the late-modern approach to risk management, Actor-network theory (ANT) with its inherent multi-vocality facilitated by the relational analysis, provides a suitable lens for examining risk and safety culture. The ANT-informed analysis of the socio-technical systems characterized by the case studies reveals how latent errors/resident pathogens contribute to failure modes. Case studies from the Oil and Gas industry provide the context of the analysis of safety culture eliciting, through the lens of ANT, insights into the problem space of risk within complex socio-technical systems.
