Special report
CULTURE
Talking about safety and culture Do we really know what we mean when we talk about safety, risk and culture. Sociologist Susan Silbey provides some much-needed perspective BY SUSAN SILBEY
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etween 2000 and 2007, safety culture emerged as a common trope in contemporary scholarship and popular media as an explanation for accidents and as a recipe for improvement in complex socio-technical systems. Over 2250 articles in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals appeared in an eight-year period while only 570 references occurred in the prior decade, and none before 1980. What do people mean when they talk about safety culture? Three conceptions of culture circulate: culture as causal attitude, culture as engineered organisation, and culture as an emergent system of signs and practices. Consider the oldest notion where safety culture is understood as a measurable collection of individual attitudes and organisational behavior. When culture is talked about as a causal agent expressed in workers’ attitudes, it drives organisations towards “the goal of maximum safety health, regardless of the leadership’s personality or current commercial concerns,” James Reason wrote in Managing the risks of organisational accidents in 1997. However, the particular mechanism that shapes the safe or unsafe outcomes of the organisation or technology is usually unspecified, with much of the management and engineering experts debating how to define, operationalise
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For those who reject these instrumental conceptions, culture is best understood to be emergent and indeterminate, an indissoluble dialectic of system and practice
Enterprise Risk
