The focus of this study on knowledge sharing processes in one organizational field in the wake of one disaster affects the generalizability of our findings. Still, we believe that our findings to some degree generalizable, in particular to other technologically intensive, hazardous industries. Other studies about learning in such environments have indicated that the predominance of the technical paradigm in other industries, such as nuclear power (e.g. Carroll, 1998). Hence, similar knowledge sharing mechanisms and complexities may occur in these settings. To learn more about these mechanisms and complexities, it would be worthwhile to study how HF knowledge is shared in other hazardous industries, such as aviation or maritime transport, or following another serious incident in the North Sea drilling industry. Furthermore, our study particularly focuses on the struggles between a technical community consisting of engineers and a non-technical community of occupational psychologists. It seems that legitimacy issues are especially challenging for a non-technical community that aims to participate in a technically dominated industry. Hence, our findings could be generalizable to other settings where non-technical communities, trained in the social sciences, struggle to receive recognition in a technical industry.
Second, our study focuses on field-level learning processes in the North Sea region as opposed to the US Gulf of Mexico where the Macondo blowout occurred. Such spillover of a legitimacy crisis in the wake of a disaster is likely to affect how actors in different fields learn lessons. Organizational fields are characterized by different field actors and institutional arrangements (e.g. DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), hence, processes of learning and contestation in the organizational field in which the disaster occurred will likely differ from such processes in another organizational field are likely to differ. We have shown that
spillover will trigger particular contestation practices, so our findings are generalizable to other crisis settings.
Third, we investigated attempts for knowledge sharing in a particular institutional setting, namely a co-regulatory regime. In a co-regulatory regime, risk governance responsibilities are shared between industry actors and regulators (e.g. Baram & Lindøe, 2014). Learning is affected by institutions in an organizational field. For instance, learning is more likely to occur in participatory regimes than antagonistic regimes (Elliott & Smith, 2006). However, we also illustrated that in a co-regulatory regime where industry actors have important risk governance and learning responsibilities, it is unlikely that a regulator will impose new knowledge on the industry. As such, in co-regulatory regimes, it may be the case that radical learning initiatives, as proposed by marginal communities, are less likely to occur. Co-regulation is a trend in many Western societies (Power, 2007; Short & Toffel, 2008). Therefore, our findings are relevant to other industries with such regulatory regimes. Furthermore, while we studied processes of knowledge creation within and sharing by three different epistemic communities, we were not able to observe to what extent organizations adopted and implemented HF knowledge. The literature on learning from disaster has indicated that learning goes beyond the identification of lessons learned, hence, it has been argued that studies should also focus on how lessons are implemented in organizations (Elliott, 2009; Toft & Reynolds, 2005). Yet, because of our field-level focus – focusing especially on knowledge creation within and sharing between communities in a field, as well as zooming in on industry associations and regulators as drivers of field- level learning – and the collection of secondary data sources, interviews, and observations at a conference and training center, we focused particularly on mechanisms knowledge creation and sharing, which shifts focus to different mechanisms of field-level learning than adoption and implementation.
Finally, we presented the three communities as uniform groups. In contrast, several studies on knowledge creation in and across communities have suggested that communities are not necessarily peaceful groups that operate along the same line towards a common goal (e.g. Wenger, 1998). Our data also provided indications that contestation also occurred, for example, within the HF community. A stronger focus on the internal community practices of contestation could provide a better understanding why the community engaged in struggles of discipline recognition, and therefore why field-level learning about HF knowledge was limited.
CONCLUSION
Our research question was: how does a marginal community attempt to influence learning from disaster processes that are driven by established communities? We found that the marginal HF community developed a different call for more radical action than the established drilling and senior management constituencies in the wake of the Macondo disaster. Being convinced of having superior knowledge about human behavior and incident causation, the HF community aimed to justify their call for radical action to the drilling and senior management communities, and share their specialist knowledge with them. To achieve this, the HF community engaged in a struggle for discipline recognition by using self-referential strategies, like ‘using a generalized sales pitch’, ‘using decontextualized, non-technical HF knowledge in a technically dominated environment’, and ‘using specialist HF language in a management environment’. However, we found that the HF community did not contextualize its specialist knowledge and language to the dominant discourse and values of the drilling and management communities. As such, their justification strategies reinforced knowledge boundaries between the communities, limiting the HF community’s ability to transform established knowledge in the field. Furthermore, their attempts to share knowledge were constrained by institutionalized learning mechanisms and responsibilities in the North Sea risk regime, which kept boundaries between the established and marginal communities in place. Our study indicates the need for marginal communities to engage in strategic political actions to influence learning from disaster, while also maintaining awareness of potential institutional constraints such as institutionalized values, discourses, and learning mechanisms and responsibilities.