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This chapter examines and discusses the unintended outcomes of the production bonus scheme the mine had instituted to motivate and increase the productivity of the frontline mining teams. This is crucial given that the maladministration of the bonus system could lead to a range of undesired outcomes such as deteriorating levels of trust between management and frontline workers, prioritisation of production at the expense of safety, poor work relations and ultimately low levels of organisational, employee and team performance. There are a number of organisational, management and labour factors that can render a production bonus scheme effective or ineffective. These factors influence the nature and extent of worker reactions to the bonus scheme.

This chapter examines and discusses the factors that influenced the reaction of the mining teams to the team-based production bonus scheme and the extent to which mine management fulfilled its side of the bargain in the implementation of the production bonus. The chapter highlights the manner in which the team-based bonus system influenced teams of stope workers to engage in their informal organisational practice of making plan (planisa) in order to offset the snags that jeopardised their prospects of earning the production bonus. The chapter reveals that, to a large extent, the productivity bonus generated conflict rather than cooperation at the point of production down the mine. As a result, the incentive scheme failed to live up to expectations by not eliciting the desired levels of organisational, worker and team performance at the rock-face.

The aim of this chapter is to explore clean language interviewing (CLI) for incidents where a serious injury or fatality (SIF) has occurred and to identify what difference this type of interviewing can make where high risk and high efficacy must co-exist. The primary focus is non-criminal SIF investigative interviews in North American utilities and the use of CLI in root cause (RC) accident investigations.

Nearly 900,000 serious injury or fatality accidents occur annually in the US, which are quite literally a matter of life and death for individuals, distressing for loved ones with grave consequences for organisations in which they occur. Despite the gravity of these accidents, training for interviewers is woefully lacking. This chapter describes how 11 experienced root cause analysts conducted investigative interviews and reports on their experience before and after learning skills in clean language interviewing.

Findings show that when investigators learn how to ask cleaner or non-content leading questions, there is a higher level of confidence in the data elicited. The analysts noted several advantages of conducting interviews with clean language including: appreciably easing interviewee's response to questions; creating an environment of trust and non-blame for injured individuals and witnesses; and a non-interrogative approach that provided psychological and emotional safety. Transcripts of an interview prior to and post training in clean language interviewing methods illustrate the difference that questions make. The chapter concludes by highlighting some benefits and challenges of using clean language interviewing in serious injury or fatality interviews.

This essay, invited by the editors, provides a retrospective overview of Robert Gephart's career using qualitative research methods to study disasters, and disseminating findings from the research in important management and organizational journals. Dr Gephart's work is associated with many methodological innovations. These include early use of grounded theory; early application of text analysis software to support analysis of extensive documentary data sets including legal proceedings and transcripts; development of ethnostatistics to explore risk assessment; explicating and elaborating abductive processes during the research experience; and using an autoethnographic approach to embed data from his own life in his research (before the term autoethnography was in common use). His contributions to the area of disasters and research methods innovations are wide ranging and provide tools for improving our understanding of risks and crises, and for managing them.

The purpose of this article is to apply what social scientists have learned from decades of research on natural and technological disasters to better understand the short-term and potential long-term human impacts of the 9/11 attacks. The short-term response to the 9/11 attacks was similar to how people and communities typically respond to natural disasters. One year after the attacks, news reports suggest that factors identified in technological disaster research as causing collective trauma, rather than recovery, are beginning to surface. We identify three patterns typically present in (but not restricted to) the aftermath of technological disasters that contribute to slow recovery and ongoing collective trauma and evaluate the likelihood that these factors will impact the recovery process for those impacted by the 9/11 attacks. We conclude that due to perceptions of governmental failure, the likelihood of protracted litigation, and uncertainty regarding the mental and physical health of victims, the social and psychological impacts of the 9/11 attacks will likely be severe and long-term. As such, the concluding section recommends the implementation of a long-term clinical intervention program for mitigating these potential chronic impacts and facilitating the timely recovery of survivors.

Cameroon’s contemporary legislative and institutional frameworks for disaster risk management (DRM) encapsulate the concept of Civil Protection (CP). Diverse disaster risk profile and high incidence/frequency of co-occurring natural and human-induced hazards are intimately linked to increasing vulnerability and fragile economy, transforming hazards into emergencies, crises and disasters, with dire livelihood consequences. To curb growing disaster risks, the Cameroon government instituted basic legislative and institutional frameworks for DRM, through top-down hierarchical, and ex post decision-making processes. Existing frameworks combine multi-hazard, multi-stakeholder and multidisciplinary/agency approaches. Inertia, limited foresight and proactiveness, innovation capacity and limited stakeholder involvement have rendered DRM ineffective. Existing DRM instruments are vague and not explicit. DRM lags behind a rapidly evolving disaster risk profile, and implementation is scattered across ministries/agencies, rendering cross-sectoral cooperation and coordination difficult. Although Cameroon is a signatory to many international disaster risk reduction (DRR)/DRM frameworks, and frequently participates in international DRR/DRM events, implementation of international agreements leaves much to be desired. The Directorate of Civil Protection – Cameroon’s sole legislative DRM institution is marred by bureaucracy, centralisation and insufficient power to perform. There is an urgent need to overhaul existing legislation and institutional frameworks for effective DRM in Cameroon.

This chapter brings new evidence on the relationship between employees' well-being, sickness absence, and four dimensions of workplace performance: productivity, efficiency, quality of service, and profitability. It uses a new panel data set with monthly observations over two years for 48 local units of a large multisite organization in the logistics sector. It finds that good consultation and communication at the local level are associated with lower absenteeism. It also finds that lower absence is associated with higher efficiency, productivity, quality of the service, and profitability of the firm. Finally, the authors suggest that the link between workers' absence and this firm's profitability runs through the increased use of replacement labor, which raises short-run costs and reduces quality of service.

This chapter addresses a number of issues related to work hours and work addiction. The dependent variables associated with working long hours include health-related illnesses, injuries, sleep patterns, fatigue, heart rate and hormone level changes, as well as several work/non-work life balance issues. Motives for working long hours such as joy in the work, avoiding job insecurity or negative sanctions from a superior, employer demands, are addressed in detail, and a multitude of moderators shown to have affected the work hours and well-being relationship, are reviewed. These include reasons for working long hours, work schedule autonomy, monetary gain, choice in working for long hours. The chapter suggests a need for more research to better understand workaholism and work addiction, as well as provides a number of implications and organizational and societal suggestions for addressing work-hour concerns.

Outbreaks are in the category of biological disasters amongst geological, climatic, biological social/human, and technological disasters. This study has been examined under the category of biological disasters, since the opposite has not been proven definitively from the beginning of the epidemic process of Corona. The hypothesis of our study is based on the fact that disadvantaged groups of people carry out a serious struggle for survival during epidemic periods. Due to the necessity of certain and fundamental solutions regarding this fact, in the last part of our study, suggestions were made on how these groups, including street vendors, can participate in the management. Disadvantaged groups are the groups most affected by these crises in times of local, regional, national, or international disasters and crises. These are categorised into the poor, children, women victims of violence, disabled people, elderly people, immigrants, addicts, and chronic patients. Our study focussed on the poor (those who work informally) and immigrants (immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees) from these disadvantaged groups. In particular, the poor and immigrants can be provided with dominant missions in the provision and distribution of public goods and/or services carried out by states through the central or local government, and the process can be completed much more successfully. For example, particularly, in the distribution of aid, in the formation of response teams, in the feeding of street animals, in public administration, etc. It is possible for them to participate in the management of public goods and service provision in other very important tasks. This level of participation can be directly executive.

Risk reduction in cities of fast developing nations is both an opportunity and a big challenge. It is an opportunity because cities are considered efficient spatial forms of human habitation where smart interventions can be optimized. However, involvement and ownership of urban society is a big challenge. This paper illustrates these challenges and opportunities with an example of India's largest city – Mumbai. It discusses Mumbai's key drivers of risk, contributing factors to vulnerabilities and places it in the context of the 2005 flood – a disaster of a scale never experienced before. Citizen–government partnerships emanating from community-based small-scale initiatives for improving neighborhood's environment are analyzed. The paper concludes that there are enormous benefits in scaling up the participatory approaches, which result in reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing resilience of cities. Urban risk reduction will remain a daunting task if not built around these existing strengths of cities and their citizens.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework of the industrial relations (IR) system in China’s coal mining industry, combining the roles of management organizations, workers, and trade unions, as well as government agencies. It is one of the first empirical attempts to investigate the relationship between human resource (HR) practices, labor relations, and occupational safety in China’s coal mining industry over the past 60 years, based on the secondary data on coal mining accidents and case studies of two state-owned coal mines in a northern city in Anhui Province, China. The fluctuating occupational safety has been affected by government regulations over different time spans, marked by key political agendas, and by coal mining firms taking concrete measures to respond to these regulations, while exhibiting differing safety performance in state-owned versus township-and-village-owned mines. The field studies compared a safety-oriented to a cost-control-oriented HR and labor relations system, and their influences on safety performance. Coal mining firms and practitioners are advised to shift the traditional personnel management paradigm to a modern HR management system. In addition, although workers are often blamed directly for accidents, it is suggested that workers’ participation and voice in various processes of decision-making and policy implementation, and trade unions’ active involvement in protecting workers from occupational hazards, be encouraged.