Occupational Risk Prevention and Business Economic Performance — An Approach to the Issue Through Participatory Action Research

Do measures to prevent workplace accidents and occupational diseases contribute to companies’ economic performance?

Over the past two decades, numerous studies in economics and management science have supported the hypothesis that prevention yields economic benefits. Many of these studies propose measures of the return on prevention efforts, which are thus treated as investments. However convincing these studies may be, the hypothesis of the economic benefits of prevention is neither self-evident to stakeholders nor scientifically established.

Having traced the origins and implications of the issue of the relationship between prevention and performance in socio-economic life, we offer a comprehensive analysis of the contributions and controversies surrounding this issue within the scientific community: labor studies, management science, and economics. We conclude that the hypothesis—taken at its highest level of generality, namely that of a constant and unambiguous relationship between prevention and performance—is undecidable. It is more accurate to consider this relationship as contingent, that is, dependent on contextual factors. The question then becomes one of identifying the factors that, in a given context, determine this relationship.

We address this question through action research and participatory methods by considering work contexts as they are experienced by the actors. The “force field” approach thus makes it possible to identify the factors that govern the convergence or divergence of prevention and performance in a given situation. We present an example of how this method was implemented in a construction company and its results for both the participants and the researchers. When viewed within its work contexts, the prevention-performance relationship reveals a complexity that is rarely apparent in more traditional scientific approaches.

While the prevention-performance relationship plays out in work situations that are always specific, it is precisely through these situations that it must be understood. However, a work situation can always be understood from a dual perspective.

On the one hand, work consists of implementing a program of activities and resources aimed at achieving predefined objectives. This is the top-down perspective: from this viewpoint, prevention principles and production methods appear to be distinct. Belonging to different spheres of action, they are potentially in competition with one another in their implementation. The challenge, therefore, is to ensure their convergence.

The results obtained in the “force field” workshop show that this convergence can be achieved by taking workplace issues into account. We thus derive several practical implications from this hypothesis: one is intended to facilitate changes in professional attitudes, particularly...