This book benefited from the financial support of a French Government scholarship between 1976 and 1978. It sponsored a doctoral thesis in which initial theoretical, empirical, and historical reflections on acci- dents were developed and written while I was a student at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. The New Zealand Depart- ment of Labour funded a study on industrial accidents and night work during 1979-80. In 1982-83, the award of a postdoctoral fellowship by the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) permitted a first version of this book to be finished. In the...