ABSTRACT
Introduction High-risk organizations are faced with the problem of having to achieve a delicate balance between centralization and decentralization, that is between minimizing uncertainties and coping with uncertainties. The concept of loose coupling postulates that organizations can simultaneously ensure autonomy of actors and sufficient binding forces for all actors to use their autonomy in line with the organization’s objectives. This can also be considered a core characteristic of resilient organizations, as loose coupling allows for the appropriate mix of stability and flexibility in the organization. This chapter focuses on rule management in organizations to discuss the challenges of designing loosely coupled systems. This focus was chosen because standardization is one of the core elements of safety management in most organizations. At the same time there is increasing concern that standardization does not help human actors especially in states of abnormal operation where they would need strong, but also flexible guidance. The crucial question becomes which kinds of rules to design for whom and for which processes instead of how many rules there should be. In the following, some theoretical foundations and empirical results on the use of rules and their effects in organizations are presented and a framework for rules management developed.
