Learning the Trade: A Culture of Safety in Practice

Abstract

This paper presents an ethnographic study of how safety is mastered by novices on a building site, in order to highlight the social and cultural character of learning. Adopting a situational focus, the paper explores how knowledge is acquired and transmitted, and how a culture of practice sediments and is perpetuated in the process. The paper takes the community of practices as the privileged locus of learning and transmitting practical knowledge. This study is therefore an attempt to understand in what forms and by means of what mechanisms building-site novices are socialized in the community of practices and how, within this process, the competence relative to safety and danger is learned.