Recurring themes in the legacy of Jens Rasmussen

The work of Jens Rasmussen over the course of the last half century represents some of the most influential contributions to the fields of cognitive science, human factors, ergonomics and safety science. His work has inspired researchers and practitioners in a number of fields including psychology, organisational behaviour, engineering and sociology (Le Coze, 2015).

Early work on the Skills, Rules, and Knowledge taxonomy for example, was instrumental in fostering the development of models of human error during the1980s and 90s (e.g. Norman, 1981; Reason, 1990). In more recent years, a large amount of research has drawn on theoretical and practical aspects of Rasmussen's work including his models of the boundaries of safe operation, ecological interfaces and methods such as cognitive work analysis.

Rasmussen's work on the RiskManagement Framework (Rasmussen, 1997) has been cited over1000 times since its original publication in 1997 and the extent of his influence across the wider research community is growing at a fast rate (Wears, 2015). His research has taken on renewed relevance and importance in the light of recent large-scale systems disasters and accidents (e.g.

Fujushima Daiichi, Deepwater Horizon,and South Korea Ferry Disaster e Jun et al. and Lee et al., this issue), as well as recent developments in the fields of normal accident theory (Perrow, 1984), resilience engineering (Hollnagel et al., 2006)and the high reliability organisation (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007;Le Coze, 2016a).