Coping with the unknown – time and technology in formal organizations searching for safety

The article deals with the paradoxical fact that, while living in a safer society, we feel that we live in a more vulnerable society than before. To explain this paradox a socio-systemic analysis of formal organisations searching for safety is undertook. The use of technology as structural coupling between social systems and environment is first of all focalized in order to verify the hypothesis according to which technology not only saves time, but also makes time scarcer than before. As a result technical plants not only solve but also produce prevention problems. That is: any technical control of dangers is a risk. Two relating problems are taken into consideration, the scarsity of time and the scarsity of attention. This leads to the conclusion that formal organisations searching for safety are anticipatory systems which usually cope with the temporal paradox of normalising rare events. Two forms of unfoldment of such paradox are finally discussed, strategical planning and insurance.