ABSTRACT
This paper explores how Norwegian water passenger transport is organized to prevent unwanted events. Resilience engineering is used as a framework to analyze qualitative data of sharp and blunt end personnel in two different passenger transport organizations and evaluate the companies as low in learning and anticipating and a touch higher in monitoring and responding. This low ability to prevent unwanted events is explained by external factors-one has to look beyond each organization to understand how resilience is formed and maintained; managers work within safety regulations and economical boundaries to facilitate prevention of unwanted events. Many crew members claim the safety systems hamper them in using experience to make decisions according to context and describe emergency situations that cannot be handled properly due to formalized plans and lack of manpower. This tension between the system and the crews’ resistance to pre-defined actions can be a safety problem in some regards, but it can also work as a layer of resilience.
