Resilience engineering: a state-of-the-art survey of an emerging paradigm for organisational health and safety management

Resilience engineering has been suggested to represent a new strategy for improving health and safety management. However, what resilience engineering is, and/or how it is different to organisational resilience is unclear. This paper provides a survey-of-the-art of RE in its widest context, based on a review of 46 articles published between January 1988 and December 2012. The state-of-art suggests that (i) a significant portion of literature comes out of work done in aviation, healthcare, nuclear and petro-chemical industries; (ii) there is no clear definition of OR, or of RE; (iii) RE lacks a clearly defined theoretical framework, and (iv) the gap between work as imagined and work as performed is an important reference point for research and practice in RE. The paper provides a working definition of RE and identifies a number of areas for advancing research and practice in this area of organisational health and safety management.