Towards a Better Understanding of Workplace Discourse

The Rhetoric of Risk challenges conventional notions of workplace discourse grounded in a notion of instruction as a set of hierarchical and highly specified procedures that will necessarily produce reproducible—and by implication—safe results if workers understand the instructions and follow them 

As we have seen in previous chapters, local knowledge is critical for effective risk assessment, but local experience may be so highly specific (site specific) that the lessons learned cannot he translated to new environments. Generalized instructions may require adjustment (as when carpenters file down a new door to fit an old door frame). In a crisis, individuals may not have time to articulate all of the uncertainties in the decision process. They need numerical risk assessments to help them assess whether they can bring conditions into compliance with standards in a timely manner. They know that any risk estimate is an uncertain approximation of material hazards underground, but they need some kind of approximation so that they can estimate risk and adjust their practices accordingly.  

As I argued in chap. 5, individuals draw on many types of knowledge to warrant judgments about risk. Having more than one basis for assessing risk also creates a healthy skepticism that can alert individuals to signs of trouble—when the methanometer always produces the same reading, for example, or when the drill seems to hit resistance in the rock. 

Ultimately, however, the burden will fall upon writers (trained and untrained) to develop new documentation practices that can balance the tension between liability and flexibility, formal standards and the realities of day-to-day uncertainty in local sites. Before we can create new forms of documentation, we must reexamine the fit between current documentation practices and the uncertainties of work in hazardous environments. 

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