• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.265-276
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• 2018

Background: Resilience engineering is a paradigm for safety management that focuses on coping with complexity to achieve success, even considering several conflicting goals. Modern sociotechnical systems have to be resilient to comply with the variability of everyday activities, the tight-coupled and under-specified nature of work, and the nonlinear interactions among agents. At organizational level, resilience can be described as a combination of four cornerstones: monitoring, responding, learning, and anticipating. Methods: Starting from these four categories, this article aims at defining a semiquantitative analytic framework to measure organizational resilience in complex sociotechnical systems, combining the resilience analysis grid and the analytic hierarchy process. Results: This article presents an approach for defining resilience abilities of an organization, creating a structured domain-dependent framework to define a resilience profile at different levels of abstraction, and identifying weaknesses and strengths of the system and potential actions to increase system's adaptive capacity. An illustrative example in an anesthesia department clarifies the outcomes of the approach. Conclusion: The outcome of the resilience analysis grid, i.e., a weighed set of probing questions, can be used in different domains, as a support tool in a wider Safety-II oriented managerial action to bring safety management into the core business of the organization.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.205-210
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• 2017

The convergence healthcare industry in Korea has been stalled due to conflicts between stakeholders as well as a supplier-centered industry structure. This situation is caused by the structural contradiction in which the Korean industry has a prolonged conflict structure among stakeholders due to a strong regulation and an institutional inertia from the viewpoint of the sociotechnical system. Therefore, it is necessary to identify new system management plan that enhances social acceptability such as laws, customs and ideas while reducing conflicts between stakeholders. In this study, mainly adapting the stakeholder-oriented autopoiesis and focusing on publicness of healthcare, we propose the rationale and direction for policy making to harmonize various systems within the convergence healthcare industry.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Illuminating and Electrical Installation Engineers
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.8-21
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• 2015

Technology for electric lighting has been evolving from Incandescent Lamp(IL) through Fluorescent Lamp(FL) and currently to Solid State Lighting(SSL) such as LED for more than 130 years of time. However, it took more than 100 years until the transition from IL to FL across overall society. That is because the transition is the Socio-Technical Transition(STT) which involves various social elements. This study investigated and analyzed the theories regarding STT, and applied the Multi-Level Perspective(MLP) theory to the case of electric lighting. A qualitative contents analysis was used with secondary data as research method, and the analyzed result was visualized based on the frame of MLP theory. The STT of electric lighting from IL to FL took place as the order of Technical Niche, Socio-Technical Regime and Landscape. Specifically, in Technical Niche level: Establishing Market Niche, Price-Performance Improvement, Learning Process and Support of Powerful Group took place. In Socio-Technical Regime level: Changes in Social Network, Changes in Technology and Changes in Rules. In Landscape level: Macro-Political Development, Socio-Economic Trends and Macro-Economic Trends took place in consecutive order.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.296-307
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• 2018

Background: Safety culture, acting as the oil necessary in an efficient safety management system, has its own weaknesses in the current conceptualization and utilization in practice. As a new approach, resilience safety culture (RSC) has been proposed to reduce these weaknesses and improve safety culture; however, it requires a valid and reliable instrument to be measured. This study aimed at evaluating the reliability and validity of such an instrument in measuring the RSC in sociotechnical systems. Methods: The researchers designed an instrument based on resilience engineering principles and safety culture as the first instrument to measure the RSC. The RSC instrument was distributed among 354 staff members from 12 units of an anonymous petrochemical plant through hand delivery. Content validity, confirmatory, and exploratory factor analysis were used to examine the construct validity, and Cronbach alpha and test-retest were employed to examine the reliability of the instrument. Results: The results of the content validity index and content validity ratio were calculated as 0.97 and 0.83, respectively. The explanatory factor analysis showed 14 factors with 68.29% total variance and 0.88 Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index. The results were also confirmed with confirmatory factor analysis (relative Chi-square = 2453.49, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation = 0.04). The reliability of the RSC instrument, as measured by internal consistency, was found to be satisfactory (Cronbach ${\alpha}=0.94$). The results of test-retest reliability was r = 0.85, p < 0.001. Conclusion: The results of the study suggest that the measure shows acceptable validity and reliability.

• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.41-53
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• 2011

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to introduce new research trends of human error and accident modeling and to suggest future promising research directions in those areas. Background: Various methods and techniques have been developed to understand the nature of human errors, to classify them, to analyze their causes, to prevent their negative effects, and to use their concepts during design process. However, it has been reported that they are impractical and ineffective for modern complex systems, and new research approaches are needed to secure the safety of those systems. Method: Six different perspectives to study human error and system safety are explained, and then seven recent research trends are introduced in relation to the six perspectives. The implications of the new research trends and viable research directions based on them are discussed from a cognitive systems engineering point of view. Results: Traditional methods for analyzing human errors and identifying causes of accidents have critical limitations in complex systems, and recent research trends seem to provide some insights and clues for overcoming them. Conclusion: Recent research trends of human error and accident modeling emphasize different concepts and viewpoints, which include systems thinking, sociotechnical perspective, ecological modelling, system resilience, and safety culture. Application: The research topics explained in this paper will help researchers to establish future research programmes.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.45-78
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• 2012

What is a disaster? And what can science and technology studies tell us about it? There might be numerous definitions about disaster. In this article, we will posit that disaster is an incident when sociotechnical system actor-network broke down against the other force in their "trial of strength". This is a process that punctualized actor-network is depunctualized, and a status that readiness-to-hand of Being recedes while pesentness-at-hand of tool-being comes forward. Using the concept of disaster as a case study, we will consider how Latourian ontology overlaps with Heideggerian philosophy of technology. This STS approach which hasn't been previously studied might provide us with new theoretical framework that enables us to construe the assemblage of technoscience and nature-society in the field of PUS or NPSS.