- Title
- Exploring risk-awareness as a cultural approach to safety : Exposing the gap between work as imagined and work as actually preformed
- Creator
- Borys, David
- Date
- 2009
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/39840
- Identifier
- vital:3647
- Identifier
- ISSN:1443-8844
- Abstract
- Safety culture has risen to prominence over the past two decades as a means by which organisations may enhance their safety performance. One way to conceptualise safety culture is as an interpretive device that mediates between organisational rhetoric and safety programs on the one hand, and how local workplace cultures make sense of and choose to interpret the rhetoric and programs on the other. More recently, risk-awareness programs have emerged as an approach to changing safety culture. Front line workers are encouraged to become risk-aware through programs designed to prompt them to undertake mental or informal risk assessments before commencing work. The problem is that risk-awareness programs have not been the subject of systematic research. Therefore, the purpose of this ethnographic study of two sites within a large contract maintenance organisation in Australia was to explore the impact of a risk-awareness program upon workers’ awareness of risks, their risk control practices, managers’ practices in relation to the program and the impact of the program on safety culture more generally. This study found that managers focused upon collecting the paperwork associated with the program whereas workers preferred to rely upon their common sense to keep them safe. For workers, the completion of the paperwork became a ritual that served to appease the organisational rhetoric about safety but had minimal influence upon their awareness of risk and their risk control practices. Consequently, the paperwork created an illusion of safety for managers as much as common sense did for workers. Therefore, this study found a gap between work as it was imagined by the managers and work as it was actually performed by the workers. The results of this study have implications for the design of risk-awareness programs and the role of risk-awareness programs in creating a culture of safety.
- Publisher
- IPSO Australia
- Relation
- Safety Science Monitor Vol. 13, no. 2 (2009), p. 1-11
- Rights
- Open Access
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- Safety culture; Safety programs; Risk-awareness programs; Workers; Managers
- Full Text
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