Is resilience engineering realist or constructivist ?

Jean-Christophe Le Coze (1) , Kenneth Pettersen (2)

1 INERIS - Institut National de l'Environnement Industriel et des Risques
2 Center for Risk Management and Societal Safety

This exploratory paper questions whether resilience engineering is a realist or constructivist approach of safety. After a presentation of two positions: critical realism and radical constructivism, the authors explain how the frameworks provided by these two positions were used in different researches, answering different questions that arose during the work. For one, critical realism offered an answer to the problem of the relationship between agency and structure. For the other, radical constructivism afforded a good definition of what models can be thought as. Both developments show the relevance of taking into account of philosophical antecedents for applied research and how this is valuable for resilience engineering and the directions that could be pursued for future development.

Keywords: RESILIENCE; ORGANISATION; SECURITE; MODELE; APPROCHES; METHODOLOGIE

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]

Jean-Christophe Le Coze, Kenneth Pettersen. Is resilience engineering realist or constructivist ?. 3. Resilience Engineering Symposium, Oct 2008, Antibes - Juan-les-Pins, France. pp.175-184. ⟨ineris-00976208⟩