Resilience has been drawing attention in various academic fields including safety management studies. Previously, safety management studies emphasized rule-governed standardization. However, in recent times, it is considered to hamper organizations’ responses toward unexpected events. The emphasis has now shifted to flexibility and adjustment by workers in the field, in other words, resilience. This paper aims to highlight aspects that may be overlooked by the focus on resilience and to sound a warning over this paradigm shift. Specifically, the paper considers the following three blind spots in resilience according to which (1) standardization elicits resilience, (2) resilience causes baseline drift, and (3) resilience is functionally dissonant with other practices.
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