Schutz recognized that actions both affect the environment and are themselves potentially meaning laden. In fact, he considered actions centrally important to how people understand reality. Humans are not simply brains pumping out abstract ideas, but beings
with bodies that, by what we do, can change the physical world in which we exist. Schutz called this aspect of our existence "the world of working"2 and thought it the most important, or primary, facet of our reality. By "working" he didn't mean jobs or employment. He meant our capacities to "provoke" changes in the outer world and to have those changes ratified or rejected by others and ourselves. In the physical present we "work" by communicating with others and enacting changes upon our external surroundings based on our internal motivations.4
But, here again is that tension between present time experience and ongoing thinking about that experience. We act based upon what we understand to be the most relevant and important things from the past and future. But what one person sees as a point of relevance to act on is really only available to that person, not to anyone else. So, how do we know if people are acting illogically or irrationally or if they are acting on points of relevance we simply can't see?
Schutz became fascinated with trying to decipher how people gather all the ideas that we consider pertinent to guide our actions. He decided that the central point everyone uses by which to gauge what is relevant is death—the one thing we all collectively experience.
1 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, 227'. In the introduction to the third volume of Schutz's collected papers, Aaron Gurwitsch, writes about specific problems upon which Schutz elaborated in his theories about the
"world of common sense" or the "world of daily life." These ideas closely followed Husserl's influence and stressed that the taken for grantedness and familiarity of our daily existence incorporates a kind of knowledge that is completely different from intellectualized, scientific knowledge. Husserl explicitly distinguished knowledge used to navigate the world of everyday life as being independent of and prior to scientific knowledge. Gurwitsch in Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. Ill, xiiff. This is especially important to bear in mind as we continue with an investigation aimed at improving development policymaking and practice since these involve activities conducted in the world of daily life, not just conceived of in intellectual theory.
Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, 226ff.
"By my working acts I gear into the outer world, I change it; and these changes, although provoked by my working, can be experienced and tested both by myself and others." Ibid., 227.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Barber, "Alfred Schutz."
Knowing that we will die, he said, constitutes "the fundamental anxiety." And anticipation of this affects everything we do.
From the fundamental anxiety spring the many interrelated systems of hopes and fears, of wants and satisfactions, of chances and risks which incite man within the natural attitude to attempt the mastery of the world, to overcome obstacles, to
"7
draft projects, and to realize them.
4.0.1 Mining and the fundamental anxiety
Mining is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world so considerable attention goes towards avoiding incidents that can cause injury and death. Here, all the interests of the company and community vividly coalesce around Schutz's reference point because no one, from the most recently hired lasher to the longest serving CEO, wants a miner to die.
[WJhen someone dies underground, it's a very depressing thing for everybody.
You know? That's the last thing that you want to hear—that someone has died underground. Because one: it puts you as management in a very awkward position. What do we do? What should we have done? And so a lot of questions are asked as you would imagine. Was the place properly protected?
Was it barred down? What happened? What shouldn't have happened? All sorts of things. And then the Mine Safety Department comes in with a lot of questions by their own inspectors and independent people to look at the accident scene and find out really who was to blame. So, when someone dies underground, we all get shattered, really. It's a very disheartening thing. It's the last thing that we want to hear.
But, beyond that shared point of focus, how did executives and managers on the Copperbelt perceive the reasons for accidents and how did members of the workforce see them? What points from the past and future motivated the actions of both groups as they sought to avoid mining accidents? And how did each group interpret the other's actions?
These are questions this chapter addresses.
7 Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, 228.
It is considered the most hazardous industrial profession. In America, from 1980-89, it had the highest annual rate of traumatic fatalities as compared with construction, transportation, public utilities, agriculture, forestry, and fishing. U. Aswathanarayana, Mineral Resources Management and the Environment (Exton, PA: A. A.
Balema Publishers, 2003), 123.
9 Interview with administrator in senior executive suite, Copperbelt mining company, 2004.
4.0.2 Chapter organization
The chapter consists of three parts. The first and second sections present similar information given in different ways. This information concerns how members of the two informant groups appeared to account for and deal with mining accidents. Part one, sections 4.1 and 4.2, approaches the task in what Robin Horton would say is a very Western manner:
the whys of accident causation are classified, grouped, and compared.10 Various actions that people take to avoid accidents or correct the situation once an accident has occurred are similarly classified, grouped, and compared. Part two, section 4.3, uses a more storied means of giving information by narrating two significant points in Zambia's mining history relative to accidents. Because we are strangers trying to learn from this environment, the focus of these narratives is much more on viewpoints offered by Africans than by Westerners. The remainder of the chapter offers a summary derived from the first two sections, compares this information with a counterpart American example and with scholarly literature.