Learning safety in the workplace: A case study of petrochemical workers in Singapore

Abstract

The ability to work effectively, including being able to identify changing circumstances and respond to them efficaciously, is an enduring goal for workers, workplaces, and governments. One key element of the ability to work effectively is working safely. The oil and petrochemical industries are amongst the most hazardous and risky environments where failure to understand and maintain safe practices can lead to potentially disastrous consequences. Hence, workers must engage in continuing learning at work to maintain high standards of safe and effective work practice. In workplaces, individuals constantly influence and adjust to each other’s emerging behaviours, ideas, and intentions, including artefacts and objects through a myriad of complex interactions and fluctuations. Unlike most classroom-based learning which transpires in predefined context, all these social processes in a workplace can have profound impact in shaping learning and practices within the organizational members. In line with such considerations, the primary contribution of this research is to understand how safety is learnt in the context of everyday work circumstances. This thesis addresses the conundrum faced by high-risk organizations to maintain high levels of safety and avoid workplace accidents. The main research question guiding this study is: How can workplace learning be optimized to develop and sustain occupational competencies for workplace safety and health? This will be explored through three sub-questions: 1. What are the current provisions of learning for safety and health in a process plant? 2. How do workers engage and participate in workplace learning for safety? and 3. How can their workplace learning be optimised? A case-study approach was adopted for this inquiry to explore how site operators learn to work safely during everyday work at a petrochemical plant in Singapore. The inquiry entailed in-depth interviews with 20 site operators working in various technical roles at the work site, across an 8-week period. The aim was to identify exemplary practices that contributed to and enhanced their learning and performing tasks safely. Findings from the interviews provided rich insights into an array of institutional, social, and personal contributions and imperatives that serve as important bases for appraising the pedagogical and invitational qualities of the workplace in supporting learning and practice. These salient contributions exemplified how workers mediate their learning through participation in different practice arrangements, utilisation of artefacts and materials, as well as seeking guidance from intermediaries and social agents who provided pedagogically rich learning. Furthering these, the study posits that learning to work safely in a perilous workplace and trade will need to be contextual, interactional, relational and, more importantly, supported with legitimate and quality guidance. Drawing on these findings, the study highlights four distinct qualities that characterise how learning for safe work practices is supported and developed during work circumstances. These include: 1. Considerations for circumstantial and practice requirements 2. Legitimate and appropriate guidance 3. Interactive and informative pedagogies 4. Relational and purposeful alignment with personal and organisational goals. A learning framework is developed to facilitate these considerations through the intertwined relationship of workplace, agency and safety as a situated form of knowledge. Ways to enhance workplace learning and advance safety practice are proposed. These include advocating the need to leverage the workplace as a learning space to re-contextualise knowledge that will enhance congruency between theory and practice; effective utilisation of those social-cultural imperatives for reaffirming procedures and refine practices; and creating spaces for dialogic exploration ( Freire et.al, 1997) and strengthening relational agency (Edwards, 2011) to deepen workers’ thinking skill for occupational efficacies and achieve intersubjectivity (Alterman, 2007) consensus for safe working. Overall, this study enriches understandings of how workers situated in perilous work settings learn to work safely in specific or situational work circumstances. The findings suggest effective interventions to enhance occupational efficacies and organizational performance in safety practice. At a national level, the study contributes to refinement of the continuing education and training (CET) framework, curriculum design and reinforcement of practices that augment individual and organisational learning. Further research is recommended to investigate how the proposed interventions and pedagogical strategies effect learning and practice outcomes in similar high-risk workplaces to draw more conclusive generalisations on ways to enhance workplace learning for safety practice.