ABSTRACT
Both Barry Turner and Jens Rasmussen were qualitative authors with a keen interest in the study of real life situations beyond the experimental traditions of science. But if the former knew, endorsed and applied grounded theory, the latter did not. They shared nevertheless, as trained engineers turned into respectively a sociologist and a cognitive engineer, a cybernetics background which considerably shaped their qualitative mindsets. In the paper we discuss how it influenced their understanding and interpretation of the role played by humans in accident disaster causation. A final section of the paper discusses some of the similarities and differences in the approaches adopted by Turner and Rasmussen, in particular the relationship between the conceptual and the empirical when studying phenomena. Turner was more into describing while Rasmussen into prescribing, and although both of them were engineers, our analysis reveals some important similarities and differences in their respective worldviews.
