Professor Andrew Hopkins Interview

Craig Donaldson speaks with Professor Andrew Hopkins, FSIA, about his greatest professional achievements, challenges and goals.

Professor Kim Beazley, Australian ambassador to the US, said: “Professor Hopkins is a major

national asset. His work on the causes of disastrous accidents has made him internationally known – an element of our national capacity to intellectually ‘punch above our weight’.”

It is rare that Australian academics are so well known on the world stage. But Hopkins has come a long way since starting out as a journalist with The Age in Melbourne in 1968, before going on to complete a Master of Arts in Sociology at the Australian National University in 1970.

Starting out in safety

Hopkins recalls some of the events that led him down the safety path:  “One of the things that really sticks out in my mind is the 1979 Appin coalmine disaster. Appin is a small mining town, about 50 kilometres south of Sydney, and I think there were 14 miners killed in that disaster,” he explains.

“For some reason that I don’t quite understand, I was particularly disturbed and moved by that accident. I knew none of the people concerned, but nevertheless the news of that accident had an impact on me. I then wrote an article about that in an Australian quarterly called Crime Without Punishment and I went on thereafter to continue in this field.”

Another incident that got Hopkins thinking about safety was a young apprentice who was burnt to death in a Corn Flakes vat in Sydney. Again, Hopkins went on to write an article about this, as the legal response at the time was “entirely inadequate”.

“These two events really got me going. I’m a sociologist, I majored in the social organisational causes of these things. I’m interested in the role of regulation in preventing these things, and both of these accidents raised those issues in a very stark kind of way,” he explains.

Safety versus profit

Hopkins believes tht safety can sometimes take a back seat to the commercial drive to produce profits – a “real challenge” for OHS professionals. He recalls an incident some years ago when he was asked by the CEO of a mining company to assess safety culture in some of his mines. “He told me that I could stop work underground if I wanted to talk to the guys. So in one of the mines, I actually said, “I want you to stop work. I want the whole operation to come to a standstill and I want you guys at the mine face.”

“Well, this was much resented by the miners, because their bonuses were on the line. I didn’t get much out of these miners, but the most valuable aspect was their reaction. When I got back  to the surface, the mine manager said to me: ‘Do you realise that the stoppage you ordered cost us about $20,000 in production?’

“Now, what was astonishing to me was that, here I was, a representative of the CEO, and this [mine manager] was willing to make this point to me about how unwilling he was t  stop work in this kind of way.”

More than anything else, this demonstrated to Hopkins the pressure to continue operations and how the production imperative took precedent over almost everything else. He recalls a sociologist called Harold Garfinkel who said, the best way to understand implicit social order is to experimentally violate it and see what happens.

“In fact, that’s what I had done. I had conducted an experiment violating the implicit social order and what it demonstrated to me was, the power of that production pressure operating in that environment is just so overwhelming. This is something that we need to understand,” says Hopkins.

“We’ve got to find ways to curb this pressure – that’s the real challenge for health and safety professionals. It’s not the case that production pressures inevitably lead to accidents, but they will if they’re not curbed. You have to find ways to curb them.”

Hopkins believes OHS professionals know a great deal about the technical aspects of health and safety, but they need to combine forces with organisational sociology to understand why organisations behave the way they do, as well as take part in the process of organisational redesign to give high priority to safety.

Current motivations

Today, Hopkins is still motivated about the safety cause every time he hears about single fatalities, in particular, as “in some respects [these] are more important,” he says.

“We have more people killed in farming accidents and in road transport accidents than we do in major hazard facilities, but when large numbers of people are killed together it seems to get attention,” says Hopkins.

A “fairly significant milestone” in his career ws winning the European Process Safety Centre Award in 2008 – the first time the award was given to a recipient outside of Europe – for “exceptional contribution to process safety”.

Hopkins has also had 11 books published (together with around 50 articles in refereed journals, 26 chapters in books and 28 articles in newspapers or unrefereed journals), which have mostly dealt with major accidents.

“I guess the next book I want t write will be about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” says Hopkins, who has been engaged by the US Chemical Safety Board to take part in the oil spill investigation.

He believes the books he has written are among some of his greatest professional achievements. “I’ve managed to strike a chord in people’s minds with what I write and convey messages they want to hear,” Hopkins concludes.

Process Safety training DVD workshops featuring Professor Andrew Hopkins can be found on the FutureMedia website