Frontline Safety: Understanding the Workplace as a Site of Regulatory Engagement

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12070
• Author: Paul Almond,Garry C. Gray
• Published date: 01 January 2017
• Date: 01 January 2017

Frontline Safety: Understanding the Workplace

as a Site of Regulatory Engagement

PAUL ALMOND and GARRY C. GRAY

The concept of frontline safety encapsulates an approach to occupational health and safety that

emphasizes the “other side of the regulatory relationship”—the ways in which safety culture,

individual responsibility, organizational citizenship, trust, and compliance are interpreted and

experienced at the local level. By exploring theoretical tensions concerning the most appropriate

way of conceptualizing and framing frontline regulatory engagement, we can better identify the

ways in which conceptions of individuals (as rational, responsible, economic actors) are

constructed and maintained through workplace interactions and decision making as part of the

fulfillment of the ideological and constitutive needs of neoliberal labor markets.

INTRODUCTION

Workers on the frontline often face difficulties in convincingthose higher up in the organi-

zation of the credibility of their local knowledge. The result is that frontline actors with

valuable information are often reluctant to speak up and voice their concerns to those

higher in the organizational hierarchy.The issue is further exacerbatedby a tendency in tra-

ditional regulatory research towarda top-down approach that focuses on themanagement

systems that frame the actions of employees rather than closely examining the experiences

of those employeeson the frontline. Recently,the activities of frontline workers have begun

to receive increased attention among scholars on regulatory compliance, including the

various ways inwhich safety cultures, individual responsibility,citizenship, and compliance

are interpretedand experienced by employees on the frontline. We suggest thatthe concept

of frontline safety encapsulates this emerging approach to understanding the workplace as

asiteofregulatoryengagement.

A frontline safety approach takes seriously the relationships between individuals at the

local level, between individuals and the systems/institutions in which they are embedded,

and between individuals and their broader social and political contexts. For instance,

how are conceptions of individuals as rational, responsible economic actors constructed

and maintained at these levels? Frontline safety looks not only at how the local realities of

risk and responsibility are constructed but also at the ideological and constitutive needs

of neoliberal labor markets that are fulfilled through interactions and decision making at

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2014 Law and Society Association annual conference in

Minneapolis, USA, as part of a panel focusing on frontline safety and benefited greatly from the audience dis-

cussions and comments of the panel participants, including Ruthanne Huising, Jerome Pelisse, Susan Silbey,

and Diane Vaughan.

Address correspondence to: Paul Almond, University of Reading—School of Law, Foxhill House

Whiteknights Road Reading RG6 7BA, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Telephone:

144 (0) 118 378 7527; Fax: 144 (0) 118 378 4543; E-mail: p.j.almond@reading.ac.uk.

LAW & POLICY, Vol. 39, No. 1, January 2017 ISSN 0265–8240

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C2016 The Authors

Law & Policy V

C2016 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12070

the level of the workplace. In this article, we put forth the need for a frontline focus. We

do so by first providing a critique of traditional top-down approaches to regulation

research that neglect or ignore the experiences and interpretations of those on the

frontline.

However, as the following part of the article shows, even if one adopts a frontline safety

approach, theoretical tensions among scholars over how they should conceptualize the

study of frontline safety still exist. These theoretical tensions are most pronounced

between Normal Accidents Theory and High Reliability Theory and between

new governance and neoliberal responsibilization understandings of regulation on the

frontline. A subtle tension also exists between researchers who adopt a constitutive

understanding of law in practice versus those who incorporate an instrumental, or

effective, view of law on the frontline. A common link, often acknowledged in these

theoretical debates, is that studies of frontline safety tend to be either managerially

focused or employee focused within the parameters of each of these tensions. Less

commonly acknowledged, however, is the underlying difference between the positions tak-

en on each axis according to the degree to which the individualizing of participants and

workers is viewed as either desirable and constructive or as constraining and detrimental

for communicationand engagement.

These tensions over how to theoretically approach the study of frontline safety not only

lead to variations in the nature of our conceptual understanding of the frontline but also

point to a more fundamental factor that underpins each of these tensions—namely, the

widespread lack of genuinely deliberative and participatory engagement with regulation

that exists within contemporary neoliberal working practices. This deficit is entrenched

and embedded by the political and ideological context of contemporary regulatory policy

making, which tends to exclude and downplay the role of organized forms of employee

representation and mobilization, thus weakening opportunities for deliberative engage-

ment still further. The tendencies toward hierarchy, power differentials, and restrictive

informational practices found within contemporary workplaces all point to the conclu-

sion that more participatory and more structured institutional arrangements for commu-

nication between the frontline and other levels of organizational structures are of central

importance if the benefits promised by the optimistic accounts of frontline safety practices

are to be realized and the pitfalls highlighted by the more pessimistic accounts are to be

avoided.

THE NEED FOR A FRONTLINE FOCUS

Regulation has largely been understood as a matter of systems, processes, cultures, and

developments that occur at a high level between government (via regulatory agencies) and

businesses (either as strategic actors or as a business constituency). This predominantly

two-way interaction, it is assumed, can be mediated in order to bring about desired out-

comes, to a greater or lesser degree. Under this view, the nature of, preconditions for, and

variations in regulatory compliance have been widely studied, with emphasis being placed

on the contributions made by regulatory style and approach (Hutter 2001; May and

Burby 1998; Ayres and Braithwaite 1992; Braithwaite 1985; Bardach and Kagan 1982),

the inherent and contextual features of organizations (Thornton, Guningham, and Kagan

2005; Gunningham and Rees 1997; Genn 1993; Hawkins and Hutter 1993), and the socio-

cultural and legal context within which regulatory interactions occur (Parker 2012;

Haines 2011a; Simpson and Rorie 2011; Gunningham, Kagan, and Thornton 2003;

Hawkins 2002).

6LAW & POLICY January 2017

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C2016 The Authors

Law & Policy V

C2016 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary