ABSTRACT
High-reliability teams have high levels of training, and their members come from different disciplines, such as medicine, nursing, or military science. Team reason, therefore, is likely to bear the mark of a formal knowledge repertoire or tool kit. This knowledge is associated with a socially valued social practice that embodies a range of cultural traditions that can be classified as, for instance, natural scientific, legal, religious, or artistic and that might influence how the team reasons. Thus, how the team makes sense of the dynamic environment depends on how the team reasons with tools and ideas formed within cultural traditions developed through societal history. Cultural-historical practices form, as argued in social philosophy for centuries (Hegel, 1807/1977), the backdrop for reason; in other words, there is an inherent, deep-seated sociality behind any kind of cognition and reason. Therefore, individual cognition, macrocognition, and team cognition are social phenomena, not primarily because knowledge is shared and can be made public but because team cognition is unthinkable without social practices such as natural science or art that provide means for team members to think and reason with. Thus, what members of society take to be rational, that is to say, mediated by societal institutions and with goals, norms, and underlying assumptions amenable to critical scrutiny, might shape what a high-reliability team takes to be worth pursuing. Thus, the notion of team reason aims to describe how societal institutions validate and shape knowledge, goals, tools, and ideas relevant to high-reliability team problem solving.
