Learning and workplace safety in temporary organisations: A review of the literature

• Contributes to knowledge on learning for workplace safety at inter-organisational worksites. • Identifies conditions functioning as barriers to learning in temporary organisations. • Ways of learning for the safety field to emhpasize under conditions of organisational temporality are identified. This paper contributes to comprehensive knowledge on learning for improving safety at inter-organisational worksites, by reviewing safety literature and comparing it to aspects of organisational temporality. How learning in inter-organisational contexts is characterised in the literature and how the outcome contributes to workplace safety are demonstrated. The paper clarifies the many aspects of temporality that are involved in and can be conditions functioning as barriers to inter-organisational learning. As such, to address problems of identifying and particularly applying or implementing new safety knowledge at such worksites, theory of temporary organising is applied to identify research contributions and (critically) discuss the literature. In addition to identifying conditions that can function as barriers to learning and workplace safety in temporary organisations, the results of the review contributes to establish which aspects of temporary organising that require further attention in safety practice and research.