Formal Incident Reporting System: Putting Solidarity on Trial

The practice of “incident reporting” is commonly recognized as an effective mean to reduce the vulnerability of “at risk” socio-technical systems (e.g. nuclear plants, large industrial facilities or hospitals), as it allow the concerned community to learn from past incidents. Indeed, it is assumed that collective resilience will be upgraded via the use of institutionalized Incident Reporting System (IRS), enabling the organization to improve the quality of the actions and reactions in case of deviation from normality, or to prevent such deviation. Yet, inductive analysis of what happens with those IRS in practice are not numerous. In this paper, we address this gap and display the results of semi-structured interviews conducted in a nuclear facility. During those interviews, participants were also requested to produce a mind map of the IRS they are concerned with. As a result, we show that safety is a matter of solidarities that are situated in specific contexts. To that regard, incident reporting is a practice of decomposition and recomposition of trusts and thus of solidarities. Reporting incidents consists in putting solidarity on trial, as the collective safety was threatened. We show that such open trial is often avoided because questioning solidarities is not always desirable in order to allow the group to continue functioning. Overall, we argue that informal reporting behaviors can also contribute to upgrade collective resilience without putting solidarities on trial.