Contracting and Safety : Exploring Outsourcing Practices in High-Hazard Industries

This open access book examines the increase in outsourcing, contracting and subcontracting as ways of organising work. It explores the impact of these employment arrangements on public safety, particularly when they are linked to complex supply networks in a range of engineering industries including oil and gas, nuclear power and aviation. The brief provides practical recommendations on how best to manage arrangements that target short-term profitability and also maintain excellence in long-term safety outcomes. The brief is a source of advice for organisations on how to maximise the benefits and minimise long-term system reliability issues that can be introduced by contracting and outsourcing, rather than assuming it to be a wholly negative or positive practice. Contracting and Safety comprises qualitative, empirical studies focusing on high-reliability organisation. As such, this brief provides a rich picture of the experience of working in complexsupply chains. It will be of interest to researchers in industrial safety, as well as safety professionals and project managers within engineering industries.

Part I: Maintenance & Operations.- 1. Contracting and Safety: Lessons From Observing an Outsourcing Process ''in the Making''.- 2. Organisational Complexity and Subcontracting Management: Confronting Lessons From Accidents and From Normal Operation Safety Assessment.- 3. Inter-Organizational Collaboration for the Safety of Railway Vehicles: a Japanese Case.- Effects of Tendering on the Resilience of Critical Services.- Part II: Capital Projects and Supply Chains.- 4. Organizing for Nuclear Safety: Exploring General Applicability of Relational Contracting to Nuclear Industry Projects with Practitioners.- 5. Playing at the Margins of Notoriously Unreliable Utility Streetworks.- 6. The Fragmentation of Workplace Safety: Long-Term Challenges for Project-Based Organization of Large Construction Projects.- 7. How Outsourcing Impacts Process Safety: the Case of Nuclear Waste Storage.- Part III: Regulation and Risk Governance.- 8. Outsourcing Risk Governance: Using Consultants to Deliver Regulatory Functions.- 9. Discussion on the Issues of Safety and Sustainability of Fragmented Systems.- 10. Outsourcing as a Way to Uphold the Scientific Method: the Case of Outsourcing of the Technical Dialogue.-11. Concluding Remarks.