Societies oftentimes hand collective high risk phenomena such as health, energy or criminal justice to specialized 'high reliability' organizations such as hospitals, power plants or prisons for that matter. Prisons are particularly risky places as they are concerned with a substantive no-error expectation to keep the public as well as the detainees safe – thus they are exemplary loci of specialized risk work. How a prison copes with and processes critical incidents is thus a key component of very mundane, yet crucial risk work in prisons. From an organizational scholar perspective, critical incidents are occasions for sensemaking, i.e. the process through which people understand novel, ambiguous events that violate prior expectations. Thus, this study asks: how do risk workers in prisons make sense of critical incidents?
PhD candidate: Catharina Geurtzen
