City Research Online

Abstract

Frontline workers who occupy public facing, non-managerial roles are critical to the ongoing sociotechnical accomplishment of safety in complex systems, yet their role is often overlooked in relation to organizational safety programs, protocols, and training. In this paper we examine how frontline workers make judgements about potential hazards during routine work and how they respond to organizational directives that contravene their own expertise. Drawing on interviews with train drivers working for private franchises in the United Kingdom, our findings show how frontline workers’ safety culture and unique embodied knowledge constitutes their epistemic authority which ultimately supports robust safety voice and listening in a complex sociotechnical system. We show how train drivers are subject to extensive organizational controls that are meant to realize safety, but that in practice these controls are insufficient for responding to the incidents that occur on the tracks. These findings offer insight into how frontline workers draw on occupational authority to uphold a societal mandate for safety.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Lficense (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Publisher Keywords:	safety culture, occupational communities, frontline workers, occupational mandates, expertise, authority
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD61 Risk Management
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads