OHS Specialists: Position and Interaction Through the Company

Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) specialists are now well-established actors in many companies. Although their practices and profession are increasingly being studied, the relationship between headquarters safety professionals and site safety professionals is not studied.
To explore this topic, this research is grounded in the tradition of activity, organisational sociology and safety science research. In this study, I follow an empirical, ethnographic approach in a high-risk company. This company has decentralised part of its safety department to operational divisions while safety was historically centralised to its headquarters. The aim is to reconnect safety with operational activities. Through interviews and observations of the company's diversity of actors, I intend to understand the safety issues they face daily and how they interact with each other. I intend in the article to share some preliminary outcomes.
One of them concerns the OHS specialists who have moved from a position of prescribing (headquarters) to a more grounded presence in the field (industrial sites), are seeing a gradual redefinition of their job/profession and the decentralization of the prevention policy. Secondly, the management of operational divisions now incorporates a decentralised safety dimension. Interviews and observations show that it can generates some contradictory discourses and, consequently, misunderstandings in operational sites. Finally, with the separation of the safety department into the company's three divisions, each one seems to be moving towards greater autonomy, which distances them from the previous unified safety policy and the loss of some of their power.
This empirical work invites a situated approach of OHS specialists within the company for a better understanding of their daily practices, with greater sensitivity to different categories and positions of safety professionals.

Keywords: OHS specialists, Sociology, Ergonomics, Safety science, Grounded, Ethnographic approach, High-rick organization, Decentralization, Bureaucracy, Power.