Safety culture: transferring theory and evidence ... - Industrial Centre

Behavioural Research in Road Safety: 10th Seminarincreasingly important in bridging European and North American approaches to riskmanagement, to high reliability organisations, and to the investigation and prevention oflarge-scale accidents. The increasing globalisation of many systems of production andfinance, and dependence upon organisational systems as we approach the millennium andbeyond, means that these factors are of increasingly wider relevance.In traditional ‘high hazard’ industries such as nuclear, petrochemicals and aviation it isbelieved that organisational culture presents us with the next critical frontier in accidentprevention efforts as, increasingly, many of the more obvious technical and human factorsroutes for safety improvement are exhausted. Furthermore, attempts to measure andimprove safety culture are moving beyond these industries into more mundaneorganisational contexts where routine accidents occur (HSE, 1997). In the roadtransportation context one can pose the question of whether some part of the variance infleet driver behaviour, and consequent accidents, might be understood in relation to thenew theory and empirical research being generated by safety culture research?Moving from an initial concern with the modelling of organisational preconditions tofailure or hazard contemporary researchers and practitioners are now concerned to specifyhow knowledge of such factors might be used to enhance safety. Chernobyl again marks acritical juncture. Considerable evidence was available prior to 1986 of the very severeproblems of control posed by administrative failures of foresight in complex socio-technicalsystems (Turner 1976, 1978). And while the earlier Three Mile Island accident in the USAhad been interpreted, by Perrow (1984) at least, as evidence for the inevitability of seriousaccidents in certain forms of complex system (of which nuclear power plants were hisparadigm example), the organisational errors and violations of operating procedures whichcontributed in part to the Chernobyl disaster were interpreted by commentators to beevidence of a ‘poor safety culture’, both at this plant and within the former Soviet Unionnuclear industry more generally (OECD Nuclear Agency 1987).Of course, in the late 1980s this hypothesis stemmed much more from a rhetorical attemptto reassure Western publics that Chernobyl couldn’t happen here, than from any direct orsystematic social science analysis of the deep and complex issues involved in this question.Hence, our own research group’s review of the immediate post-Chernobyl discussions ofsafety culture critiqued its reduction to a combination of administrative procedures andindividual attitudes to safety (Turner et al 1989), which seemed to us to be at the expense ofthe wider organisational issues. What was crucially missing, both then and in manycontemporary treatments, was the shared characteristic of all social organisation andculture.Implicit in the original claims is the assumption that if the Chernobyl accident – or theKing’s Cross Underground fire in London, or the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska – couldindeed be put down to a ‘poor’ safety culture, then there might surely be something, forwant of a better word, called a ‘good’ safety culture, which safety managers might thenpromote, design, or encourage in order to head off some of the worst consequences oforganisational-system failure? In the 1990s, therefore, interest in the topic of safety culturehas burgeoned as engineers, risk managers and nuclear safety practitioners, and evenindustrialists, have attempted to operationalize the concept and to judge its significance. Inparallel, both risk management consultants, and to a lesser extent the applied social scienceresearch communities, have responded with a variety of conceptual frameworks (of varyingdegrees of theoretical grounding) and a rapidly expanding empirical research literature,particularly in Europe (see Cox and Flin, 1998).50