Maybe you should remind us of these recent process safety disasters?

I wouldn't call a train crash a 'process industry' accident. Savar, India - lack of detail - process industry or general factory fire?? The American accidents - say no more, in my experience - lower safety standards than Europe/UK. If it isn't in 'the code' they won't do something to improve safety. Nigerian oil leak - genuine leak or the locals trying to steal product?

Buncefiled? Cash is king in the working environment - or prove to me otherwise!

So does that mean you all don't think that Safety Culture is an issue, and that all is well with current approaches?

SImply providing a list of brief details of accidents doesn't say much about an organisations safety culture. The root causes of the accidents needs to be understood, before passing comment on possible safety culture implications.

Maintaining a culture is damn difficult. Our problem (as companies and nationally) is we don't learn from past mistakes or retain a memory of them. The posh boys ( and I include labour leaders in this) were not around to see Abervan (SP?) Flixborough Piper alpha etc Likewise every 5 years my company have a flush of new shiny faced managers who don't appreciate systems were developed to eliminate past incidents and can't understand why we spend so much time on safety awareness and positive culture development.

Hoosier SIT is really an alternative to Behavioural Safety and 'Just Culture' paradigms as it starts on quite different assumptions and skills of intervention. Here goes my lunch break while I briefly out it..... Social Identity Theory (SIT) emerged from the research and personal experience of management of risks in social interactions of Henri Tajfel, a Polish immigrant to the UK activitist in rehabilitation of refugees after WWII. His insights into gaps between the ‘theory’ and practical applications of SIT were enlarged on by an Anglo-Australian psychologist, John Turner, whose early work experience included phases of exposure to hazardous experiences on construction sites. While Tajfel’s social experimental research underscored how arbitrarily people in groups created insider-outsider boundaries, Turner introduced the concepts of ‘self-categorisation’ and ‘social categorisation’ to account for results of experiments into the management of group boundaries. In the wake of these pioneers, scholars mainly in the UK, the Netherlands and Australia have tested out additional SIT concepts in educational, community and work contexts highlighted ways in which stereotyping and bias create barriers in ways that some regard as ‘natural’ while others regard as ‘unacceptable’ (sometimes phrased with less refinement). In practice, decisions about work performance and productivity, safety, quality, waste as well as dispute and negotiation management emerge from how individuals and groups conduct self-categorisation and social categorisation at different levels of identity: the personal level, the social (and intricate) level, human level and animal level. Safety cuts across all four levels and is particularly intricate at the social level in relation to organisational identities. Against this background, a culture about ‘safety’ hinges on the reality data a groups use to represent the world of work in which they operate. A simple examples from my experience may indicate how safety culture emerges from process of self-characterisation and social categorisation. In a relatively small family-owned distribution firm, an employee (Z) acted with some anger when she found that she was suffering from painful symptoms of musculo-skeletal disorders attributable to the data input machine she was using at work (at the animal level of self-characterisation); although they had not previously given the matter any thought, the owner-managers (D & A) accepted her account as a fact, especially as a colleague also reported experience similar symptoms. At the human level of categorisation, both Z and D & A professed the belief that the employer should fulfil any legal obligations arising from their employment relationship, including an obligation to provide para-medical help free of charge to Z, time necessary to recuperate and actions to prevent a recurrence. At the social level, there did not appear to be much scope for the company to offer Z an alternative way to carry out data input tasks but she expressed an interest in working in a telephone sales role. At the social level, only D and A had the authority to make any decisions about investing in resources and training to make this method of controlling risk possible. At the personal l level, the employee was very scared lest her injury should present a barrier to aspiration to move on to train to work with handicapped children, building on her degree in textile design. At this level, D & A respected her ambition as reasonable At this level, both parties also professed strong beliefs as members of fundamentalist Christian churches. The critical task for me was to persuade Z to speak to D & A calmly; once this was achieved, they exercised their authority (and processes of categorisation) to bring forward a decision to invest in a new telephone system and to train Z in a role as a sales telephone operator. A culture of ‘a safe behaviour’ in this instance required moving Z from using equipment likely to contribute to recurrence of musculoskeletal injury. Norms of a ‘just’ culture was central to the self-categorisation and social categorisation of all members of the firm. Within the SIT framework, my own contribution lay in my own use of categorisation processes to avoid stereotyping D & Z as proprietors by dwelling on the failures in compliance with the DSE Regs, the COSHH Regs, The Equality Act 2010 and the Employment Act 1996. It would take me the afternoon to outline deviations from the above model, for the processes of distorted self-categorisation, social categorisation and stereotyping can result in such complex mental, emotional, behaviour and political deadlocks and conflicts. Yet sometimes even these are prised open with careful listening, observation, social experiments and cautious feedback, at times in funny (in both senses) ways. Where SIT scores in how it supports skilful design of social experiments based on substantial research about motivation, communication, group behaviour and safety leadership at work. If you wish to receive specific references to read about SIT, you're welcome to PM me.

For what its worth and regardless of the failures that were quoted by the original poster, I don't believe that "Safety Culture" is something that should be "Re-Visited" my view is that it is a constant within our job. My Prime Contractor has a Safety Maturity Matrix which goes from level 1 (Really don't think too hard about safety issues) to level 5 Exemplar (Safety is just the way we do things) You've heard all the buzz words and hype I'm sure, but its a real issue, the last stage in level 5 is the companies "Safety Culture" because it is the most difficult and elusive to achieve, that's the level where you have to change peoples attitudes and behaviors. I'm not an expert in behavioral safety but I know enough to realize that its the Utopian Dream of the safety fraternity, difficult if not impossible to attain, but that's no reason to give up.

Hoosier The topic omitted from research and constructive discussions about working safely is a very simple yet greatly neglected five-letter one, namely 'power'. While this extends to 'communications', it is far, far, far bigger than that. A very simple way in which some companies abuse their power consists in demonstrably false communications about 'safety as our main value' As a simple test, ask a group of 10 senior managers to tell you up to three messages on the safety noticeboard displayed in a prominent location on their site, which many will physically pass at least once a day. How much do you want to bet that you'll get more than one valid response?

As it just so happened, I wrote and delivered a 4 hour course yesterday at work (trial run for EHS reps critique) on Safety Culture and why we do what we do at our place of work. I covered DWH because it was mahoosive and also the Challenger and Columbia disasters because they showed a complete lack of learning by the people who really should be the safest and most technically competent people in the world. It is designed for newbies to introduce them to the way in which we work, but also for those people in the "I've been doing this job for 35 years and I've never had an accident" brigade who although they don't work unsafely (we have an excellent safety record), don't really embrace the principles wholeheartedly and keep failing their training (as EHS sign off is a necessary and integral part of all competencies). So should we revisit the concept of safety culture? Yes - all the time and endlessly so that standards don't slip and we don't become complacent.

Hoosier 21st century Social Identity research has a far more radical approach to power at work than the Just Culture. For example, Wisse and van Knippenberg, 'Power and self-construal. How the self affects power processes', (in Tjosvold and Wisse, Power and Interdependence in Organizations, Routledge, 2009) emphasise how much organisations fail to validly measure how candidates for all level of leadership, not least at senior levels, are assessed in terms of their behaviour use of power.

I agree an interesting debate, albeit a long and winding road. The complex issues associated with multi-causality (safety culture) is varied, a bit like a safety climate survey - it's only a snapshot in time. Whilst their is a potential for human and component failure there will be adverse events. Despite a plethora of information on behavioural safety no one has managed to prevent human error - to err is to be human. Only through better design and technology can we reduce the impact of human error. Until then it is a matter of - Human Error or Last line of Defence?

Hoosier & Imwaldra - come on! Stop snigggering between yourselves, what's the joke? I have my suspicions and if I'm right my plan ( almost did this yesterday!) to alerting Hoosier to "Improving Safety Culture" by a certain Dr Cooper would have been rather pointless.

Thanks Just downloaded that Will read and hopefully generate some CPD points in passing I wonder if it will join my often referenced copy of Improving Safety culture

Well it resulted in a good discussion.............. and a book to read. You were someone who insprired me to move into general H&S (from product safety) some 25 years ago after I attended a training course you ran. I have (only) 2 books on my desk - Improving etc and Tim Marsh's Affective Safety Management

Back to the original question from Hoosier, Dominic, or whatever - do we need to re-visit the concept of safety culture? No, I don't think it has ever been unequivocally defined. To what extent cultural factors influence incidents or incidents influence the culture is a moot point. However I do think that we need to review where we are as an industry. There have been far too many initiatives which have been introduced which add little value, indeed, some have had a negative effect IMO. As practitioners we need to get smarter by challenging some of these beguiling practices - decisions made in Boardrooms without understanding the impact on the shop floor.

Q. “It may be time to review our current knowledge of safety culture. What do you think and what more needs to be done?” I am not sure whether the review should be of our current knowledge or the application of “safety culture”. If my memory serves me correctly this term became more common in the UK during the mid eighties when organisations were beginning to look for ways to include human behaviour into main stream management of OSH as well as other areas of management. It was then later placed into UK culture by the HSE. The principle was to recognise that organisations, like equipment, will inevitably/eventually fail and that without reference to human behaviour any attempt to reduce or prevent recurrences would never be successful. I remember the emphasis placed at the time on the fact that it was never a standalone tool but one part of a much bigger picture. All well and good to begin with but one might argue that there is a paradox, a quarter of a century later, in still wishing to separately identify a safety culture from an organisational culture. Does it result in re-inforcing the perception that OSH is somehow an added extra? How often does it result in attempts to impose a culture across a conflicting and stronger organisational culture? Reported experience would suggest that it does in many cases and, of course, fails as a result. If we seek truly integrated management then it is the organisational culture, of whcih OSH is a part, that has to be managed. I don’t doubt that the importance of understanding human behaviour and the underpinning sciences are as valid today as they have ever been but the continued use of “a safety culture” as something to be learnt and practised is beyond its sell by date. Moreover, the continued insistence that there is something called a safety culture limits our ability as OSH professionals to interact with and help to define organisational cultures. So is it time to move beyond using the term ‘safety culture’? Are OSH professionals now better educated and informed about the principles in order for them to be able to focus more on the underpinning science and leave behind this poor descriptor? Many of us have successfully achieved this. I guess the better examples might be where Quality, HR and OSH have combined in identifying and improving culture within an organisation. The current situation in the UK with HMG taking a counter culture stance also provides some good indicators of the dangers of relying on or placing too much trust in the benefit of a "safety culture".

At the end of the day one can describe cultures in general terms much as Friere did many years ago Banking - Tell everyone what they must do Independent - Tell people why they must do things Conscientised - people relate to each other and make decisions concerning actions and their effects We are all still in the second except for some exceptons for some periods of their history ie Dupont, BP and some of the petrochem giants