The Social (Re)construction of an Incident Reporting System: Opening-up, Closing-down, Starting over

The literature on incident reporting generally describes Incident Reporting Systems (IRS) as technological tools aiming at improving safety in organizations by initiating a learning process from previous events, in order to prevent future incidents and accidents to occur. In this respect, many studies tend to focus on “barriers to reporting” in order to understand why people report (or not) incidents in the dedicated system. Alternatively, we proposed to study IRS as socio-technical artifacts which are embedded in a specific organizational culture and which are interpreted in different ways, illustrating what has been called “interpretive flexibility”. This communication is divided in two parts. First, relying on the Social Construction Of Technology (SCOT) framework, we present the different practices and meanings attributed to the reporting of incidents within the Belgian Nuclear Research Center (SCK•CEN). We link these to the various modes of learning that they enable. By doing so we participate to the opening-up of the research on Incident Reporting to alternative discourses, practices and meanings, unforeseen situations and uncertainties. Second, we present the preliminary results of creative workshops during which we initiated the participatory re-construction of the IRS within the Center, drawing on and extending the results of the “opening-up” phase. By doing so, we aim at contributing to a transparent realization of the reduction of complexity leading to an informed and collective decision on what could/should be the IRS of the Center. In conclusion, we propose a reflexive analysis of this process, and we formulate tentative future research directions.