Creating Resilience – A Matter of Control or Computation? : Resilience Engineering explored through the lenses of Cognitive Systems Engineering and Distributed Cognition in a patient safety case study

Sammanfattning: In recent years, the research approach known as Resilience Engineering (RE) has offered a promising new way of understanding safety-critical organizations, but less in the way of empirical methods for analysis. In this master’s thesis, an extensive comparison was made between RE and two different research approaches on cognitive systems: Distributed Cognition (DC) and Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) with the aim of exploring whether these approaches can contribute to the analysis and understanding of resilience. In addition to a theoretical comparison, an ethnographic healthcare case study was conducted, analyzing the patient safety at a pediatric emergency department using the Three-Level Analytical Framework from DC and the Extended Control Model from CSE, then conducting an RE analysis based on the former two analyses. It was found that while the DC and CSE approaches can explain how an organization adapts to current demands, neither approach fully addresses the issue of future demands anticipation, central to the RE perspective. However, the CSE framework lends itself well as an empirical ground providing the entry points for a more thoroughgoing RE analysis, while the inclusion of physical context in a DC analysis offers valuable insights to safety-related issues that would otherwise be left out in the study of resilience.