The use of knowledge in occupational safety and health: From knowledge creation to employee use

One concern to emerge from the research discussed in the two previous chapters is the degree to which the professions and organizations involved with health and safety are basing their practice on reliable and valid knowledge. Is their work informed by the best available evidence? Is it really more robust than the much-vaunted ‘common sense’ of the ordinary citizen or entrepreneur? Should we trust and respect safety professionals as gatekeepers to expertise rather than dismissing them as self-interested peddlers of quack remedies? Our contribution explores how health and safety knowledge in the UK reaches the professionals and organizations that might make use of it. This is a study of the translation of knowledge, of the media used to distribute it and of the ways in which it reaches practice. For the most part, we are dealing with what is known as ‘explicit’ knowledge: the two projects by colleagues from Loughborough University, described in the following chapters, give more attention to the role of ‘tacit’ knowledge. We focus on the higher-level questions raised by UK critics of health and safety interventions. Is a body of good quality knowledge available to inform interventions? Can practitioners effectively access knowledge relevant to their concerns in usable forms? Are health and safety practitioners, and the organizations where they work, able to make use of this knowledge?