Organizing Safety in Security Organizations

Abstract

Safety and security are often regarded as two separate concepts, both scientifically and organizationally. Both are often seen as two fundamentally conflicting institutional demands and their agendas as being based on two profoundly different organizing principles. Because of this, safety may get less attention in security organizations than necessary as such a distinction would mean in the perception of people that funding for the one would go at the cost of the other. This chapter points out that organizing for security and for safety may not be so different after all as both safety and security seem to develop from the same social structures and institutional complexities. The differences between the two seem to be a matter of social construction, power and policy, rather than that these differences would inevitably follow from what one would regard as their intrinsic features.