Cooperative conflict and contested space: a case study of risk and safety in the steel industry.

This dissertation is a journey into the world of risk and safety in the steel industry. The problem statement that is explored in this study relates to the nature of the relationship between safety performance and stakeholders in the steel industry, the nature of the relationships between different stakeholders and the way in which these relationships impact on risk management strategies. The author contends that safety is not a normative or procedural system within the workplace, but rather a performative system. Performance in this system, which determines life and death, is based on consensual cooperative-conflict relationships between different role-players. The nature of these relationships are analysed and explored with the concept of cooperative conflict as a reference, while keeping temporal and spatial considerations in mind. The physical space of the steel mill is a contested space. Within this space, relationships play out themes relating to agency, masculinity, risk, resistance, compliance and survival in a constant subliminal negotiation for power and perceived control over an environment that is inherently threatening in nature. The research is presented as ethnography in the form of a case study of an international organisation that provides materials handling and slag reduction services to the ferro-industry in South Africa. The researcher interacted with role-players in this organisation as a participant observer, with the primary method of data gathering and analysis being qualitative in nature. Data gathering and analysis revealed that safety performance relates to specific aspects within the work environment, namely macro political, economic, institutional, psychological and concrete factors. The researcher concludes that overt, normative safety management procedures in the steel industry only provide a backdrop for daily risk management strategies. Negotiating risk, together with the often covert ways in which actors assert their agency within the steel industry, makes safety performance complex and relationship based. To improve safety performance in the steel industry, relationships and power need to be renegotiated. This requires internal organisational changes as well as larger systemic changes.Prof. T. de We