Contaminantes Orgánicos

KNOWLEDGE FROM

THE PERIPHERY

– STRUGGLES

OF A MARGINAL

COMMUNITY

TO INFLUENCE

LEARNING IN THE

WAKE OF DISASTER

3

ABSTRACT

Industrial disasters are important triggers for collective learning in an organizational field. Yet, research has indicated that disasters can trigger contestation between actors in an organizational field that limits field-level learning. Previous research has argued that powerful, established actors in the field may impose their perspective of event definition, causes, and required solutions on other actors, thereby shaping the learning process and re-stabilizing the status quo. However, learning from disaster studies have failed to investigate how marginal actors struggle to influence the learning trajectory. This is an important topic, because marginal actors may drive institutional change in a field following a crisis event. We borrow notions from the transformation perspective on knowledge sharing and the communities-of-practice literature to highlight that field-level learning from disaster is a process in which marginal epistemic communities struggle to overcome epistemic and political boundaries to transform established knowledge. We conducted a qualitative analysis into the activities of the marginal Human Factors (HF) community in the North Sea offshore oil and gas industry to influence field-level learning in the wake of Macondo disaster. Being convinced of their superior knowledge about human error and incident causation, they aimed to justify their specialist discipline and persuade the established drilling- and senior management communities to engage in radical learning. However, the HF community’s strategies failed to connect to important values and discourses of the established communities, thus failing to overcome knowledge and political boundaries, and transform knowledge about human error and incident causation in the field. Our study indicates the need for marginal communities to maintain awareness of potential institutional constraints such as institutionalized values, discourses, and learning mechanisms and responsibilities. The failure of marginal communities to overcome knowledge and political boundaries may contribute to field-level learning that reinforces established knowledge and practices, rather than change deeper assumption, values, and beliefs.

INTRODUCTION

When organizations in high-risk industries lose control over potentially hazardous technologies in their production processes, it may trigger catastrophic disasters that harm environment, people, and the organization’s survival (Beck, 1992; Perrow, 1999). Consequently, organizations must learn from their disastrous experience to prevent recurrences (e.g. Pearson & Clair, 1998). This is a costly strategy, however, given a disaster’s

tremendous impact. To avoid the cost of disaster, high hazard organizations may instead learn vicariously from the disaster experience of others (Madsen, 2009; Nathan & Kovoor- Misra, 2002). This is important, since the harmful practices that contributed to a disaster may be institutionalized across organizations in an organizational field (Elliott & Smith, 2006; Wicks, 2001). Furthermore, spillover mechanisms may expose organizations in a population to legitimacy crises triggered by a disaster (Shrivastava, 1987; Yu, Sengul, & Lester, 2008). Therefore, actors in an organizational field should learn collectively from the disaster experience of a field member. An organizational field is defined as a community of organizations with disparate interests that interact frequently with each other about a central issue of interest, including competitors, suppliers, consumers, regulatory agencies, special interest groups, and associations (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Hoffman, 1999). Through quantitative studies scholars have shown that learning from accidents – represented by a decrease in incidents – may occur at the level of a field (Baum & Dahlin, 2007; Haunschild & Sullivan, 2002; Madsen, 2009; Madsen & Desai, 2010). Yet, other research has shown that collective industry learning from disaster is not straightforward. Contestation between different communities may be expected in the wake of a disaster: Research on field disruptive events has indicated that crises may destabilize established rules, meanings, and social positions in a field and trigger a ‘war for meaning’ between field actors that limits learning and change (Hoffman, 1999; Muller-Seitz & Macpherson, 2013). Despite these insights, the literature on learning from disasters and crises has paid insufficient attention to learning from disaster as a contested process (Lampel, Shamsie, & Shapira, 2009; Sagan, 1994). First, while research on disaster sensemaking in the wake of a crisis has studied contestation about disaster definition and identification of causes and solutions (e.g. Gephart, 1992), learning from disaster goes beyond this initial sensemaking phase (e.g. Toft & Reynolds, 2005). We propose that even when a particular event definition and set of solutions has pushed out alternative framings, contestation may still occur during later learning phases. Second, most disaster sensemaking studies focus on political strategies of dominant actors to restabilize the status quo by imposing their event definition, identified causes, and proposed solutions on other actors, for instance through formal public inquiries (e.g. Brown, 2000). In contrast, these studies do not pay sufficient attention to the attempts of marginal actors to influence the field-level learning process. We argue that this is an important topic. For instance, research has indicated that learning in destabilized social hierarchies – e.g. following a disaster – is likely to be triggered by low-ranking actors (Bunderson & Reagans, 2011). Also, research on social movements and institutional change following disruptive events has shown that marginal

communities may successfully use field crises to challenge the legitimacy of knowledge and practices enacted by established communities and drive changes in institutionalized practices, beliefs, and authority relations (Fligstein, 1997; Fligstein & McAdam, 2012; Hoffman, 1999; Maguire & Hardy, 2009; Micelotta & Washington, 2013). In this study we address these two gaps. Our research question is: how does a marginal community attempt

to influence learning from disaster processes that are driven by established communities?

To better understand field-level learning from disaster as a contested process between established and marginal communities, we borrow notions from the knowledge transformation perspective on knowledge sharing across ‘communities of practice’ (CoP) (Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2002; 2004; Carlile & Rebentisch, 2003; Gherardi & Nicolini, 2002). This body of literature highlights that collective learning between epistemic communities with different interests is a political process in which actors have to overcome knowledge boundaries and to merge their knowledge to create mutual understanding and engagement (Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2004; Gherardi & Nicolini, 2002). While this may involve searching for common ground and consensus, actors may also use their political skills to influence the learning trajectory according to their interests (Macpherson & Jones, 2008; Mork Hoholm, Ellingsen et al., 2010). By integrating the literatures on learning from disasters and knowledge transformation across communities, our study makes several contributions. First, the knowledge transformation literature helps to conceptualize the contested nature of field-level learning from disaster as a struggle over the transformation of knowledge between different communities. Second, we contribute to the literature on knowledge sharing by studying attempts for knowledge transformation in an organizational field, a setting characterized by the absence of formal hierarchy (Knight, 2002; Moynihan, 2009). Most studies on knowledge sharing and transformation have focused on joint projects in formal hierarchical settings, such as organizations (e.g. Bechky, 2003) or joint ventures (e.g. Tsang, 2002), where managers establish dependencies between communities for the sake of collaborative projects. Our case emphasizes a situation where collaboration is not presupposed as in joint projects and where established communities may easily resist marginal communities’ efforts for knowledge transformation (Bunderson & Reagans, 2011), Finally, we contribute to the literature on knowledge transformation by introducing the influence of field-level institutions (Mork, Hoholm, Ellingsen et al., 2010). Knowledge transformation research has focused mainly on (inter)organizational collaborations, and the influence of the external institutional context on processes of knowledge transformation has so far been ignored. Yet, in high-risk industries the institutionalized risk regime plays an

important role in shaping how the lessons learned are likely to be transferred throughout the organizational field (e.g. Elliott, 2009).

In this paper we examine how a marginal community attempted to share its supposed superior knowledge about incident causation with established communities to learn from the Macondo disaster in April 2010. The Macondo disaster was a blowout on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico in which 11 offshore workers died and which became the largest accidental oil spill in worldwide history (Read, 2011). While the disaster occurred in the US, the corresponding legitimacy crisis spilled over to other offshore regions. We empirically investigate contestation in knowledge sharing in the North Sea region, because this setting provided a clear example of a struggle of a marginal community – the Human Factors (HF) community – to influence two established communities – the drilling community and the constituency of senior management. Their struggle involved attempting to persuade the established communities to adopt their call for radical change in the wake of the Macondo disaster. This call for change was based on specialist knowledge from the HF discipline about human error and behavior. Human error always plays some role in the causation of accidents in sociotechnical systems (e.g. Reason, 1997), as was also the case in the Macondo disaster (U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, 2016). In technological industries human error is frequently identified as the root cause of accidents (Dekker, 2014). As such, learning from disaster tends to focus on prescribing more technical training or creating more detailed procedures to constrain human behavior and reduce human failure. This also happened in the wake of the Macondo disaster (U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, 2016). Yet, the HF perspective on human behavior recognizes that human error, while possibly being a direct cause to an incident, is often a consequence of situational influences, like job characteristics and/or organizational factors (Health and Safety Executive, 1999). The risk and safety literature has long championed the HF perspective as the appropriate view on safety in hazardous organizations (Dekker, 2014; Reason, 1997). Macondo investigation reports also confirmed the value of HF by showing how human errors leading up to the disaster were rooted in various organizational and cognitive factors (e.g. U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, 2016). Hence, the HF community argued that training of personnel was inappropriate. Instead they proposed that effective learning required oil companies to implement HF training and engage in organizational change processes to alter harmful job characteristics and organizational factors.