Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 34, Issues 1–3, February 2000, Pages 1-14
Safety Science

Editorial
Culture's confusions

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0925-7535(00)00003-5Get rights and content

Section snippets

The papers

This Special Issue is based on a selection of papers presented in workshops at two conferences in 1998 — the International Injury Prevention Conference in Amsterdam, and the International Association of Applied Psychology Conference in California. I was the convenor of the Amsterdam workshop, Ian Glendon and Neville Stanton of the Californian workshop. The two meetings brought together two rather different groups of researchers, with little overlap in papers. We therefore decided to combine the

Issues and questions

It would be nice to be able to conclude that this Special Issue will give the reader a consensual picture, which would make clear an agreed framework within which we could conduct research for the next 10 years to tidy up our understanding. It is clear that this is far from the case, as the reviews at the end of the issue demonstrate. In fact, one of the few things on which all the papers agree is the call to do more research to clarify the field and try to reach that consensus. The issues

Definitions and models

A first question is whether there is such a thing as ‘a safety culture’. Is it some sort of entity or aspect, which if present or well developed is good, but which may be largely absent and hence bad? Or is it an output variable, which refers to the result which an organisational culture with particular characteristics has on safety performance. Most definitions, including that used by the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA 1991) or ACSNI (1993), quoted in a number of the papers, treat

Levels of aggregation

This leads us to the issue of the level at which measurement and validation needs to take place in the study of safety culture.

If culture is a phenomenon which only has meaning at the group or organisational level, we must always ask whether the group which we have defined for the purpose of study is truly a group. Is it a meaningful entity, whose members would recognise it as such, and would differentiate it from other entities? This can be seen as an empirical question. Measure the attitudes

Identification and measuring tools and their application

All of the above adds up to a major problem for the design of tools to identify and measure cultural factors and climate scales. If we look back from incidents and major accidents to try to identify the relevant cultural factors, as Pidgeon and van Vuuren do in this issue, and as all the pioneering work in this area has done in the past, we are open to a hindsight bias. We can only see as far as our theories and models can shine their searchlights, and we will be inclined to see the factors we

So what is safety culture?

Having said at the beginning of this editorial that this Special Issue does not reveal a clear picture, and having given it the title of “culture's confusions1”, it would be foolhardy of me to come to any firm conclusions here. However, I would not want to end this editorial on too negative a note. I have had a great many critical things to say about the poor state of our knowledge and proof about what is important in safety

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