Accounting for the ICI fire: partial connections between lay and expert knowledge

This note presents a case study of the 1984 ICI chemical fire—a major New Zealand occupational health and safety incident. Details are presented of various health and illness disputations that arose after the fire and the way these tended to coalesce into lay and expert factions. Not wishing to treat lay/expert as a fixed dichotomy, we use the term 'partial connections' to emphasise that lay or expert knowledge is a socially accomplished and precarious element of actor-networks. Nevertheless, once these elements are made more durable, 'harder' social outcomes result, and in the case of the ICI fire the 'hard' facts tended to disfavour the lay actors and their knowledge.