“The eyes and ears of the railway”: How frontline workers uphold safety through their occupational expertise and embodied epistemic authority

Abstract

Frontline workers who occupy public-facing, non-managerial roles are critical to the ongoing sociotechnical accomplishment of safety in complex systems, yet their role is often overlooked in relation to organizational safety programs, protocols, and training. In this paper, we examine how frontline workers make judgments about potential hazards during routine work and how they respond to organizational directives that contravene their expertise. Drawing on interviews with train drivers working for private franchises in the United Kingdom, our findings show how frontline workers’ safety culture and unique embodied knowledge constitute their epistemic authority which ultimately supports robust safety voice and listening in a complex sociotechnical system. We show how train drivers are subject to extensive organizational controls that are meant to realize safety, but that in practice these controls are insufficient for responding to the incidents that occur on the tracks. These findings offer insight into how frontline workers draw on occupational authority to uphold a societal mandate for safety.