There is little empirical evidence on the predictive value of safety culture assessments (SCAs) in relation to how accident-prone an organisation might be. Recently, Antonsen not just demonstrated how a quantitative SCA mispredicted future safety outcomes, but actually showed an inverse relationship between the assessment and subsequent critical incident investigation findings. To add to our understanding, this article presents research on whether a SCA has a predictive capacity for safety outcomes. Like in Antonsen's research, an opportunity emerged when a helicopter taxiing accident, resulting in a rotor strike occurred for a helicopter squadron that had just undergone a SCA. The assessment used ‘culture ladder’ rubrics for its findings, which allowed us to look for specific features in the subsequent independent accident investigation (in which the researchers were not involved). As with Antonsen's findings, our research shows that a ‘ladder’-based assessment has little predictive value. Any predictive value it has is in the inverse of the assessment findings. For instance, where the SCA showed that the safety culture was very mature regarding finding a balance between safety and the mission at hand or the breaking of rules, the accident investigation pointed these out as the causes of the accident.@en

The shortcomings of incident-based metrics for worker safety such as total recordable incident frequency rate (TRIFR) are well documented. In particular, a low TRIFR is no assurance against legal liability. There is considerable overlap between the literature on safety as the presence of capacities to make things go well, and jurisprudence in labour and workplace safety law on employer due diligence. In this article, the authors propose an index that merges the two, measuring the capacities to acquire and maintain safety knowledge, to understand the nature of operations, to resource for safety, to respond to risks, to demonstrate engagement and compliance, and for assurance.

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Following other contributions about the MAX accidents to this journal, this paper explores the role of betrayal and moral injury in safety engineering related to the U.S. federal regulator’s role in approving the Boeing 737MAX—a plane involved in two crashes that together killed 346 people. It discusses the tension between humility and hubris when engineers are faced with complex systems that create ambiguity, uncertain judgements, and equivocal test results from unstructured situations. It considers the relationship between moral injury, principled outrage and rebuke when the technology ends up involved in disasters. It examines the corporate backdrop against which calls for enhanced employee voice are typically made, and argues that when engineers need to rely on various protections and moral inducements to ‘speak up,’ then the ethical essence of engineering—skepticism, testing, checking, and questioning—has already failed.

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Dutch medical disciplinary law aims to promote quality of care. Safety II is a scientific approach to quality promotion that is increasingly being adopted in the Dutch healthcare system. We compared both approaches. Safety II recognises that doctors act based on efficiency-thoroughness trade-offs and identifies factors that lead to success. Disciplinary law answers culpable actions with disciplinary measures. We conclude that for Safety II, the distinction between culpable and inculpable is meaningless, while the disciplinary approach mainly provides a negative warning function. Safety II is better suited for medical practice, because healthcare is complex and benefits from a high degree of discretion. Disciplinary law should therefore be given a role that facilitates more reflection on success factors. The fact that it can take action against doctors who perform poorly does not detract from that: Safety II fulfils this function better because it does not wait for something to go wrong but acts proactively.@en

In this book, Sidney Dekker sets out to identify the market mechanisms that explain how less government paradoxically leads to greater compliance burdens. This book gives shape and substance to a suspicion that has become widespread among workers in almost every industry: we have to follow more rules than ever-and still, things can go spectacularly wrong. Much has been privatized and deregulated, giving us what is sometimes known as 'new public management,' driven by neoliberal, market-favoring policies. But, paradoxically, we typically have more rules today, not fewer. It's not the government: it's us. This book is the first of a three-part series on the effects of 'neoliberalism,' which promotes the role of the private sector in the economy. Compliance Capitalism examines what aspects of the compliance economy, what mechanisms of bureaucratization, are directly linked to us having given free markets a greater reign over our political economy. The book steps through them, picking up the evidence and levers for change along the way. Dekker's work has always challenged readers to embrace more humane, empowering ways to think about work and its quality and safety. In Compliance Capitalism, Dekker extends his reach once again, writing for all managers, board members, organization leaders, consultants, practitioners, researchers, lecturers, students, and investigators curious to understand the genuine nature of organizational and safety performance.

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Over the past decades, government safety management regulation has been driven by deregulation, simplification and organization-level regimes of inspection. So-called functional rule-making requires organizations to implement safety management systems appropriate for their operations. The paradox that seems to have arisen is that overregulation is common in many organizations. Research has found over-proceduralization, safety clutter, bureaucratic overload, and procedures not at the service of safety. To explore the paradoxical relationship between governmental deregulatory measures and organizational overregulation, we analyze empirical data from Norwegian fish farming and coastal transport. The data confirms that practitioners experience a rapidly grown abundance of internal rules and protocols, ill-fitting procedures, and pervasive, exaggerated safety management. We trace three mechanisms that have driven internal overregulation: work auditability; managerial insecurity and liability; and audit practices. These mechanisms show how functional regulation can have unintended consequences when it meets other accountability expectations. Expectations of market doctrine, bureaucratic entrepreneurism and control can lead a company transforming simple governmental regulations into vastly overcomplicated safety management systems. We conclude our study with prescriptions of how this aspect of safety could be done differently.

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