Decentralizing Risk Analysis in Large Engineered Systems: An Approach to Articulating Technical and Socioorganizational Dimensions of System Performance

Nuclear power production in France, as the domain of one national utility and one reactor builder, has a standardized profile of technical installations, safety procedures, and personnel qualifications. Despite this relative homogeneity, discrepancies are observed from one production unit to another, notably in the area of worker‐safety performance. There is a strong implication for risk analysis: varying performance cannot be attributed solely to the technical dimensions of equipment, procedures, and human skills. The authors retain as a working hypothesis that safety performance is an outcome of interactions between technical and organizational factors. Traditional risk analysis appears to be underequipped to represent such interactions. The notion of decentralized risk analysis (DRA) is introduced as a means of achieving this goal. A program of applied research carried out in a NPP facility is presented. It aims at increasing, across plant work structure, knowledge and control of these interactions specific to the given context. Systematic measurements and feedback of social representations are performed, using a three‐dimensional factor space of individual and organizational values. Direct involvement of the total plant population, transfer of analytic tools, methodological continuity, interactive elaboration of data, coordination of different levels of findings with operations, follow‐up and feedback of measured change, are the main features of this DRA process. In the case cited, improvement observed in safety performance parallels changes in measured social representations. The value of DRA for articulating technical and organizational dimensions of risk, and for integrating information into decision‐making, is argued.