Safety Cultures in the Safety Management Landscape

Abstract

As an emerging scientific concept, the notion of “safety culture” presents obvious difficulties. But this does not preclude that it can be quite useful for the management of safety. However, the usual understanding of the concept lacks a reference to an explicit safety paradigm. It describes organizational features that are expected to foster safety, but does not explicitly mention the underlying assumptions about the safety strategy expected to make the system safe. Yet, there is no one single strategy to make a system safe. Even within a given organization, there must be a variety of strategies, with a different balance between predetermination and adaptation, and different levels of control on front line operators. Each of these safety management modes will inevitably generate the corresponding “safety cul-ture”. The underlying safety management mode behind the current safety culture vision is a non-punitive version of a normative and hierarchical safety management mode. However, evolving toward this mode does not necessarily mean that safety culture is becoming more mature. Recent catastrophic accidents have illustrated the increasing vulnerability of our systems to the unexpected, and illustrated the need for a refined safety paradigm.