High Reliability Collaborations: Theorizing Interorganizational Reliability as Constituted through Translation

Abstract

High reliability organizations (HROs) need to collaborate to address risks that transcend organizational boundaries. HRO literature has yet to examine the challenge of creating interorganizational reliability, while collaboration literature can further explore how stakeholder priorities become dominant in collaborations. This study joins these bodies of literature to identify the growing domain of High Reliability Collaborations (HRCs). Drawing from 2 years of ethnographic research within a community emergency collaboration, the study theorizes that communicative translations constitute HRCs and serve to make sense of HROs and non-HROs as belonging to a shared collaborative framework. These translations are necessary to create reliability but also establish a negotiated order among collaborative stakeholders. This study finds that containing and controlling stakeholders can be an incentive to collaborate and that collaborative decision-making is influenced by stakeholder claims to urgency.

Constituting absence as reliability: The case of COVID‐19 response networks

“…In fact, reliability is “as much of a product of a relationship as it is a feature of the relationship” (Berthod et al, 2015, p. 26). Relating to each other is an important step in networks that strive for reliability (Rice, 2021). In the case of a global public health crisis, organizations may interrelate through the practices identified here by sharing information about the hazard, comparing their response to other organizations, and ultimately creating meaning together about the successes and failures of their performance.…”

“…This appears to be an incentive for many non-HROs to strive for reliability as well (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). This inclusion has created the opportunity to bring to the fore how reliability is created in response to complex and cascading disasters (Clark-Ginsberg et al, 2021) and through interorganizational relationships (Berthod et al, 2017;Rice, 2021).…”

“…This appears to be an incentive for many non‐HROs to strive for reliability as well (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007). This inclusion has created the opportunity to bring to the fore how reliability is created in response to complex and cascading disasters (Clark‐Ginsberg et al, 2021) and through interorganizational relationships (Berthod et al, 2017; Rice, 2021). While reliability research originally focused on (single) organizations that created strong cultures to attend to interoperational complexities, many complex risks require responses from multiple organizations (Schulman et al, 2004).…”

Reviewing High Reliability Team (HRT) Scholarship: A 21st Century Approach to Safety

“…Fifth, HRT members ( 5) "translate" their reliability values strategically when collaborating with outsider and non-HRT members. Rice's (2021) ethnographic study of HRTs' interorganizational collaborations with external stakeholders revealed the strategic ways members persuade non-HRT outsiders to enact high reliability. Specifically, HRT members tended to engage in substantial informal talk with non-HRT members as a means of translating their high reliability mental schemas and assumptions.…”

Application of linear regression method to predict microcontroller-based infusion fluid volume using IoT

“…At this time man does everything more practically, quickly and efficiently. So that tool technology that was previously made manually began to be abandoned in use in society (Rice & Pennington, 2024). One example of an intravenous fluid monitoring device.…”