Rethinking nuclear safety management: Injunction as a meta-concept

International audienceThe management of safety is marked by strong procedural features and permanent adjustments of social actors to situations. Focusing on these two noticeable aspects of its operational reality, we propose to go hunting for new food for thought: rethinking safety management in the light of the meta-concept of injunction. In order to understand the nature of safety injunction, we will analyze it through two approaches: a scientific one and a philosophical one. As a mass communication device triggering heteronomy to its receivers, safety injunction appears as a basis for safety management concepts. So one can note that safety injunction is a meta-concept to talk about safety. But philosophy and sciences do not insist on the same aspects of this meta-concept. Philosophy analysis leads us to think that safety injunction is linked to a model and introduce new elements in it through experience while a scientific point of view is more focused on safety injunction output with some cause-effect pathways dealing with struggles for power at organizational and social scales. However, as scientific safety injunction analysis also implies normativity and subjects' perceptions issues in its scale tension showing the difficulty to master safety injunction. That is why; one can conclude that safety injunction cannot be separated either from practice or experience. This interesting result not only helps to define safety injunction but is also an important parameter to be considered in the design of an appropriate methodology. In order to deploy and animate risk prevention measures, the nuclear industry mainly uses injunctions for safety which are practically based on the rise of expectations projected on to a unit from outside (Boussard, Demazière & Milburn 2010). The aim of this article is to define injunction as a meta-concept for safety management, that is to say a concept aiming to provide the firm grounds to a language attempting to talk about scientific concepts while discovering their meaning (Lacour 2005). First, we will define injunction around safety through a scientific and philosophical approach. Then we will analyze its impacts at a social and organizational level and the consequences lead on safety management in high risk organizations. On the one hand this will lead to notice the interest to consider injunction as a meta-concept for safety management, but, on the other hand, this will underline the necessity not to reify injunction that is to say disregarding the role of its experience in the field provided