14:00 - 15:30
Room: Aston Webb Theatre – G33
Stream: Unearthing New Scholarship on the Central African Copperbelt
Chair/s:
Emma Lochery
Safety policy in the Katangese Mining Sector: An internalized culture?
Francesca Pugliese
Liege University, Liege

Safety issues are omnipresent in the new mining company policies, which see safety training as a way to increase productivity and avoid (inter)national scandal. Safety is established by either enforcing disciplinary sanctions in the workplace or promoting an interiorized culture of safety. While the cultivation of a safety culture has been examined in mining companies that were active in the past, the present-day legacy of this type of management has not received much scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic research within different departments and the expat camp of a Sino-Australian company working in the Katanga region of DR Congo, this paper examines contemporary policies by applying a Foucauldian perspective to safety training and values. Data show how, depending on the specific value or rule concerning safety that was promoted, employees needed a longer or shorter time to accept, resist or negotiate it. This leads to certain questions that are worth examining: what happens when some of the values of the company go strongly against the ethical principles of the majority of the employees? Are there other reasons for the company to choose a specific value beyond the mere guarantee of safety at work? Which are the strategies to make them acceptable to the workers and which modes of resistance do they exert? This paper examines these questions by looking specifically at the interaction between expat managers and Congolese employees.


Reference:
Tu-A54 Copperbelt 3-P-004
Presenter/s:
Francesca Pugliese
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Aston Webb Theatre – G33
Chair/s:
Emma Lochery
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
14:45 - 15:00
Session times:
14:00 - 15:30