Safety Culture and Risk Management in Organizations

Abstract

The concept of safety culture arose in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. It is argued that safety culture represents a new way of conceptualizing processes of risk handling and management in organizational and other contexts. Safety culture provides a global characterization of some of the common behavioral preconditions to disasters and accidents in high-risk sociotechnical systems, and might also prove to be a heuristic tool to aid risk management strategies to complement current risk assessment practice. Culture is conceptualized in the current article as primarily an ideational system of meanings, and safety culture as one concerned with the norms, beliefs, roles, and practices for handling hazards and risk. Possible elements of a "good" safety culture are elaborated under three headings: norms and rules for dealing with risk, safety attitudes, and reflexivity on safety practice.