The fog of work: the necessity for black and white, and grey rules to ensure safe workplace behaviour

The research outlined here is the result of a multi-disciplinary project which brought together engineers, ergonomists, ethnographers, sociologists and psychologists, entitled “Management of OSH in Networked Systems of Production or Service Delivery: Comparisons between Healthcare, Construction and Logistics”. The project aims to identify what types of OSH knowledge and evidence are in circulation and how they interact with each other in networked organisation. More specifically, investigating how workers interpret the multifaceted information they are exposed to and how this interpretation, in dynamic work contexts, influences their behaviour. The data obtained illuminate how top-down rules (explicit information) and socially constructed knowledge manifest and combine in different types of organisations.