Did you check out my recent YT vid exploring Safety Culture (SC)? It covers several critiques and points from research: https://youtu.be/QBzOd-uejXg?si=rMbQgCRryXOYx3u0
Here’s an extract I found interesting, discussing the late, great *Ed Schein’s view of SC (taken from Teemu Reiman & Carl Rollenhagen, 2014).
Schein was said to be critical of SC – believing that we should instead focus on the processes.
And if we afford conceptual status to SC, then we would “have to grant the same conceptual status to all kinds of “cultures”, from “team culture” to “service culture”.
And culture refers to properties of groups, rather than “vague notions such as safety or service”.
In any case, for these authors, while we may be better speaking of the “culture of a group and inspect how the group views technology and its hazards, and makes tradeoffs between safety and production”, SC may still be useful as a bridge between academic and practitioner conceptualisations of culture.
[* As always, we need to be cautious about ‘appeals to authority’, e.g. just because Schein believed/said something, that it lends credibility to the argument. But, still, pretty interesting.]
SafetyInsights.org 