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This paper is based on the assumption that people in organizations do not learn ‘safety’; rather, they learn safe working practices. Therefore, there are as many safety cultures as there are communities of practice inside an organization contributing to the social construction of safety. Ambiguity plays a central role in this process since consensus and dissensus on what is safety and danger are issue‐specific and constantly fluctuating. The analysis of the explanations of the cause of accidents held by two communities of practice – engineers and site managers – sheds light on sense‐making processes relevant to the understanding of safety and to the design of a safer organization.
Gherardi et al. (Tue,) studied this question.