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MANAGING TECHNOLOGICAL HAZARDS: SUCCESS, STRAIN, AND SURPRISE 207 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. quality, achieved in almost every industrialized country, to regional frustration in dealing with acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, and tropospheric ozone enrichment, and to global uncertainty about carbon dioxide, trace gas enrichment, and nuclear winter. This shift from better-understood hazards to less understood hazards has placed an enormous burden on science to identify hazards and to assess their risks. Scientists often fluctuate between humility and hubris, and scientific risk assessment has manifested these fluctuations as well. Currently, humility appears to be in ascendance as the limits to knowledge emerge and experts routinely contradict each other in the press or the courtroom. But it should be equally recognized that while the media, the public, or the courts may demand more of science than it can give, some scientists have promised more than they can deliver. Scientists have implied that they know the significant ways in which technologies fail; that they are close to understanding the fundamental causes of cancer and arteriosclerosis; and that hazardous waste can be safely collected, transported, and stored. Thus, while some scientists could limit the burden on science, others continue to extend it, either from hubris, from a desire to reassure the public, or because they relish the challenge and opportunities for further research. INSTITUTIONS OF HAZARD MANAGEMENT As we shift our focus to more elusive hazards, the institutions of hazard management become more concrete. The institutionalization of government regulation is well known. New technological hazards that are wholly unregulated are rare. Indeed, recently perceived hazards, such as those of genetic engineering, come under regulation by at least five government agencies. Despite occasional resistance based on ideological reflex, the principle that hazards should be regulated is not seriously disputed. It is the wisdom, magnitude, social cost, and implementation of the specific regulations that fuel controversy. The excessive focus on public regulation has obscured the institutionalization of hazard management that has taken place outside of government. For example, groups claiming to represent the public interest consistently monitor most domains of hazard. Often underfunded, such public interest groups have nevertheless established legal and scientific competence that enables them to participate actively in public regulatory processes and to use the courts to guarantee implementation of congressional intent or to obtain compensation for injury. As these groups become more professional, they increasingly join with their counterparts in industry in efforts to implement regulations and to provide alternatives to regulation through voluntary efforts, environmental mediation, and the like.
MANAGING TECHNOLOGICAL HAZARDS: SUCCESS, STRAIN, AND SURPRISE 208 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. Another set of hazard management institutions are judicial ones arising from the remarkable innovation of contingency representation in class-action compensation and liability cases. This institutionalization of representation follows a long-term shift in both public attitude and legal precedent, from concern with acts of God to acts of persons and from private risk to public risk. Where a resigned public once hesitated to sue a steamship company for injury from a boiler explosion, an indignant public now blames the government for causing floods. In a time when lawyers routinely advertise for clients, insurance and self-insurance reserves provided for hazard compensation are being seriously strained. But the most remarkable institutional changeâand one receiving the least formal studyâhas occurred within industry itself. For the last two years, I have been part of a modest research effort seeking to learn more about how corporations manage hazards.1 Our studies are limited; the corporate world appears reluctant to allow external inspection or to encourage internal self- examination. But even our limited studies suggest that a remarkable set of changes has taken place over the last 15 years in corporate goals and in resources devoted to the management of hazardous technologies. Since 1970, when General Motors established its public policy committee, U.S. industry has institutionalized the social responsibility movement, creating codes of ethics in many corporations, and board of directors' committees in some of them, and, most important, establishing specific policies and operational guidelines in major corporations, such as Dow, Du Pont, and Monsanto, that produce hazardous products. Common elements in these operational guidelines include intensive efforts to screen for potential toxicity; attention to worker health and safety; concern that consumers are protected and that company products are used safely; protection of the environment by waste reduction, pollution control, effluent cleanup, and safe waste disposal; and disclosure and dissemination of correct product information. Industry has also committed resources. A recent Chemical Manufacturers Association survey in which about half the industry responded found that the mean firm surveyed had 84 health and environmental specialists, or about 2 percent of its U. S. employees, and spent almost 4 percent of annual sales on toxicity testing and environmental pollution control (Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Co., 1983, pp. 51â74). One industry leader that our group studied had a 125- employee headquarters health and safety unit, including an epidemiologist and a risk-assessment unit, a toxicology lab with 20 toxicologists, and 30 industrial hygienists assigned to plantsâresources probably exceeding those of most state governments. The resources of an industry leader may be misleading. Our limited studies have focused on large and prosperous corporations, and even within this set there are large variations in commitment and resources. Nonetheless, the major changes in approach and staffing since 1970 are widespread. Indeed,
