This 1999 paper is an interesting read, exploring the social nature of ‘safety’.
Some points I liked are:
· “operational safety is more than the management or avoidance of risk or error…[but rather] an ongoing intersubjective construct not readily measured in terms of safety cultures, structures, functions, or other commonly used descriptors of technical or organizational attributes”
· The position of operational groups as a socio-technical network, is situational and dynamically constructed, and evaluations of safety is not easily connected to “objective’ measures of real-world performance”
· They observed differences in organisations in how they mythicised heroes and villains – safety as myth and ritual.
· For some organisations (military, fire fighting), ‘hero epics’ around exceptional individual performance. In other areas like air traffic control, heroes is a critique for individuals acting without regard for collectivity
· Safe operation was seen as a “positive outcome, and the constructed narrative is one of organizational rather than individual performance”
· Defining an organisation as safe because of its low accident rate has the “same limitations as defining health in terms f not being sick”
· They talk about automation challenges, and how accelerated cockpit automation had the potential for reducing, rather than increasing, safety by “interfering with the cognitive processes”
· As automation increases, the role of the operator shifts to more of a supervisor of the equipment, reducing their sensitivity to warning signs or ability to respond to unexpected events
· Modifying the equipment or environment without fully understanding social and cultural factors may “result in increasing operational error by interfering with the less explicitly observable processes by which safety is created and maintained”
· Improving performance or constraining behaviour when “insensitively or clumsily done, can decouple the socially constructed image of safe operation from the reality, transforming an organization that can reliably judge whether it is in a ‘safe’ state of operation to one that cannot’
· They observed many times that maintenance of a high degree of operational safety “depends on more than a set of observable rules or procedures, externally imposed training … or easily recognised behavioural scripts”
And lots more good stuff in the paper that you can read.
Ref: Rochlin, G. I. (1999). Safe operation as a social construct. Ergonomics, 42(11), 1549-1560.
Study link: https://webhome.auburn.edu/~johnsrd/4050/Slides/safe%20operation%20as%20a%20social%20construct.pdf
My site with more reviews: https://safety177496371.wordpress.com
SafetyInsights.org 
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