Abstract
The relationship between safety culture and safety outcomes is well documented across industries and countries, and regulators in different industries have increasingly included safety culture in their repertory. Safety culture is, however, a fairly new regulatory concept, and it seems that knowledge is lacking on pros and cons and expected outcomes of strategies that regulatory authorities can use to improve safety culture. The aims of our study are therefore to: (1) Map descriptions of regulatory efforts to influence safety culture in companies; (2) Identify strategies employed by regulatory authorities to influence safety culture; (3) Describe (regulators’ and companies’) experiences with, and results of the strategies; (4) Discuss pros and cons of the strategies (possibilities and challenges). The paper also provides a more general discussion of whether it is possible to regulate safety culture, and subsequently what it means to regulate safety culture. The paper is based on experiences from three sectors that have introduced safety culture in their regulatory repertory: (1) The Norwegian petroleum industry, (2) North American rail, and (3) The nuclear industry. The experiences are studied in a systematic literature review reported according to PRISMA guidelines. Our discussion indicates that to include safety culture in the regulatory repertory may involve a range of different strategies, e.g. auditing safety culture, introducing new rules, providing information, providing assistance with self-measurements etc. The study identifies and discusses 5 rule-based and 6 advisory-based strategies that regulators may utilize when attempting to influence organizational safety culture.
1. Introduction
1.1. Background and aims
The relationship between organizational safety culture/climate and safety outcomes is robustly documented in studies reporting experiences across organizations, industries and countries (Zohar, 2010). The crucial importance of safety culture is also documented in a range of accident investigations (e.g. Cullen, 1990; NASA, 2003; National Commission of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2011). Safety culture generally refers to safety relevant aspects of culture in organizations (Hale, 2000). Although several different definitions of safety culture exist, most of them concern shared and safety relevant ways of thinking or acting that are (re)created through the joint negotiation of people in social settings (cf. Cooper, 2000; Guldenmund, 2000; Nævestad, 2010a), which is the definition we follow in the present study. Safety climate refers to manifestations or snapshots of safety culture, usually obtained by means of quantitative surveys (Flin et al., 2000; Guldenmund, 2007).
7. Conclusion
In this paper we have argued that it is positive that regulators have included safety culture in their repertory, as a means of pushing the regulated industry to include informal aspects in their efforts to improve safety. Our discussion indicates, however, that to include safety culture in the regulatory repertory may involve a range of different strategies. We have identified 11 regulatory strategies to influence safety culture, and we argue that the explicit/implicit purpose of all of them is to facilitate systematic organisational self-development processes in the regulated companies: to make organisations do something to improve their own safety culture. Our study indicates that regulatory efforts can set forth such processes, and potentially reduce accidents and injuries. Although we have concluded that more research clearly is needed to illuminate the outcomes of different regulatory strategies to influence safety culture, we have summed up pros and cons and results of the discussed strategies, based on available experiences.
