Safety Culture: Progress, Trends and Challenges

In this compilation, the authors first analyze three components of safety culture: safety climate, safety values, and culture of prevention. The analysis includes both new empirical results and a review of earlier studies. Following this, Safety Culture: Progress, Trends and Challenges presents a report from ethnographic work at a large grain processing facility in the American Midwest. The grain industry is inherently dangerous with its heavy equipment, confined spaces and explosive environments. Sometimes the companies value efficiency and productivity over worker safety. Additionally, the authors examine differences in safety climate perceptions between permanent and contingent workers and associations to self-reported accidents/injuries in an organisation, considering possible relevant confounders. Possible interventions and strategic efforts as proposed as tools for the promotion and consolidation of organizational mindfulness. These interventions focus signal setting on management level and collective interactions on front-line level. Recommendations for the application in different settings derive from areas of work organization, work design, strategic agenda and value setting, as well as from the promotion of organizational cultural preferences. One paper presents a model that combines theories of organizational learning, human error and situation awareness in sociotechnical task environments. A hypothesis which emerges from this model is that people who possess a questioning attitude in respect to their own contribution to error causation possess a better situational awareness of their sociotechnical work environment. Later, the effect of crew resource management training on the medical personnel of an acute medical unit is investigated, as it is an auspicious method to achieve cultural changes in high risk environments and achieve a positive safety culture. In closing, because a core objective of the International Safety Management Code is advancement of criteria for an effective maritime safety policy, the extent to which the code has been effective is discussed.