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 summer of 1986-87 the Funda~ao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo (FAPESP) and the Labora toire d'Ergonomie et de Neurophysiologie du Travail of the Centre Na tional des Arts et Metiers joined forces to fund a stay in Paris where the second draft of this book was presented in a special doctoral seminar series. The third draft was completed during a 1988 research leave granted by the Conjunto de Ciencia Politica of the Universidade Es tadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). On a further research leave from the same unit, and thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship from the Brazilian Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnol6gico (CNPq), final redrafting was carried out between August and October 1990 when I was a visiting fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Cornell University. I am deeply grateful to these institutions for their generosity.