Some debate around the construct of ‘safety culture’

As an alternative lens to yesterday’s post on the evidence surrounding safety culture interventions (* and however one wants to define the target of these interventions – safety culture, culture of safety, organisational culture focused on safety, managing culturally etc.), I’ve cherrypicked a few items from Reiman & Rollenhagen’s 2014 paper which explores some of the debate around safety culture.

Note – there’s no method or reason why I’ve selected these points out of the many discussion points around safety culture. Also, there’s dozens of likewise papers and books covering this debate.

· Image 1 describes a criticism from these authors that because safety culture can mean everything, it can then, in practice, mean little. Resultingly, it can be used as a catch-all phrase, thereby diverting efforts away from managing tangible issues.

· Image 2 describes an “ethical flavour lingering” around safety culture discourse, where attributing moralistic statements towards whole organisations may be misusing the construct.

Aptly, they argue that “To blame an organization for having a weak safety culture has become almost the equivalent easy response to system problems as was blaming individuals for human errors a few decades ago” (p9).

· Image 3 describes some sentiments from Silbey’s excellent paper (‘Taming Prometheus’), where one frustration is that some accounts of safety culture pay little attention to the mechanisms and processes that produce systemic meaning.

· Image 4 discusses some thinking around how cultures can both sensitise groups to risk but also blind them to risks. Resultingly, “Cultures are thus determined as much, if not more, by what they ignore as by what they pay attention to and what they consider important and meaningful” (p11).

Source: Reiman, T., & Rollenhagen, C. (2014). Does the concept of safety culture help or hinder systems thinking in safety? Accident Analysis & Prevention, 68, 5-15.

Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2013.10.033

Link to the LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benhutchinson2_as-an-alternative-lens-to-yesterdays-post-activity-7067255089765224449-DEDE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop