ABSTRACT

Chapter 7 recounts how safety was taken out of the engineering space and expert-driven language of system safety by high-visibility disasters and a wave of emancipatory movements in the 1960s and 1970s. The size and complexity of many of society’s safety-critical systems were becoming apparent to many—and in certain cases alarmingly so. Large disasters with socio-technical systems, and many near-disasters, brought safety and accidents to centerstage. This greater visibility helped give rise to two decades of productive scholarship, and set the stage for a lot of the conversation about safety, accidents, and disasters we are having to this day. Accidents were increasingly understood as social and organizational phenomena, rather than just as engineering problems. Man-made disaster theory was the first to theorize this, closely followed by highreliability theory and normal accident theory. Disasters and accidents are preceded by sometimes lengthy periods of gradually increasing risk, according to man-made disasters theory. This buildup of risk goes unnoticed or unrecognized. Turner referred to this as the incubation period. During this period, he suggested, latent problems and events accumulate which are culturally taken for granted or go unnoticed because of a collective failure of organizational intelligence. The accumulation of these events can produce a gradual drift toward failure.