ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some elements of an ongoing study investigating the way in which safety is produced in normal operation within a ‘large technical system’ (LTS) operating high pressure gas transmission networks. Although relying strongly on the original manuscript of the 2011 resilience engineering symposium (Le Coze et al., 2011), this new version, apart from updating and expending some sections, opens up more on the ‘engineering’ part of the study, or what we have described elsewhere for instance as the move from description to prescription (Le Coze et al., 2012). In particular, in this new version, one core issue that is raised, beyond the ability to provide descriptions of resilience (or variability, as it will be next explained), is how outsiders participate in the way an organisation manages safety, for example, through the prescriptions that take shape as a result of the descriptions (and interpretations) that they provided.
