Safety Management

Safety Management argues that it is the methodologies of the human sciences that are more suitable for providing a firm basis for safety management and offers new approaches to safety management in accordance with this view.
It has been demonstrated that incidents, accidents and disasters tend to result from complex socio-technical failures, rather than just "human error" on the one hand, or simple technical failures on the other. For the reduction of accidents, therefore, it is necessary to deal with systems factors, in which both technical and human-factors elements play an equal and complementary role. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant/technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity". This text describes a body of theory and data which addresses this issue squarely, drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, and which stresses the importance of human agency within systems. The central roles of social consensus and reliability, and the nature of verbal reports and "functional discourse" are explained in some detail. This book therefore presents a "Qualitative Systems Approach" to safety management, offering both greater safety and economic savings. It presents a series of methodological "tools" whose reliability and validity have been shown through extensive work in the rail and nuclear industries and which allow organ