Social Psychology of Risk in Canada What a wonderful few weeks in Canada at Vancouver, Whistler and Calgary. So much fun sharing the work of SPoR and challenging boundaries and practice in safety. This is the second visit to Canada and momentum is growing in interest to humanize safety practice. The workshops this time had […]
Compliance in the Name of Good
Compliance in the Name of Good It’s hard to imagine a time of when science, theology and political power were one and the same. This was the world of Europe in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The enlightenment is most identified with rejection of clericalism, religious authority, schism, persecution in the name of good […]
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The Safetyization of Normal Life
The Safetyization of Normal Life One of the delusions of safetyism is the naive belief that safetyism works for normal fallible people. One of the delusions of Zeroism is the idiocy of speaking absolutes to fallible people. Strangely safetyization is only a workplace thing, no one lives this nonsense at home. No one runs their […]
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The Sickness of Safetyism
The Sickness of Safetyism When I do training and safety people attend there is invariably someone who introduces themselves by the nominal ‘Safety Sam’ or ‘Safety Sally’. This is how they are known at work and want to be identified and unfortunately are proud of it. Funny, I’ve never met a ‘Teacher Tom’, ‘Dentist Debbie’, […]
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Safety as a Patriarchal Activity
Safety as a Patriarchal Activity One of the concerns of the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) is with Patriarchy. Patriarchy is about more than just men exorcising power. It is about the organizing of power according to masculinist discourse. Discourse is about the way power is embedded in language and the trajectory of such language. […]
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What Safety Can Learn from William Blake
What Safety Can Learn from William Blake The Social Psychology of Risk is interested in poetics (the study of linguistics and literature) and mimetics (the enactment of imitation). When one is interested in the nature of the unconscious and how humans make decisions one moves away from positivist/empiricist approaches to knowledge and looks at a […]
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The Curse of Dataism
The Curse of Dataism Beard writes: ‘The scions of Silicon Valley have introduced our world to a new religion of ‘Dataism’. In its extreme form proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe that humanities cosmic vocation is to […]
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The Curse of Cognitivism
The Curse of Cognitivism There are a range of ideologies that plague the safety industry that retard the ability to help and care for people. These ideologies drive the focus towards objects so common in the iconography of the industry (https://safetyrisk.net/the-iconography-of-safety/ ). How strange that an industry that should be dedicated to the care of […]
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The Curse of Behaviourism
The Curse of Behaviourism One of the greatest curses inflicted on the industry of safety is the toxicity of behaviourism. Behaviourism is that 1940s ideology that constructed the human being as machine, as the sum of inputs and outputs. Nothing could be further from reality. Behaviourism constructs a false world that views humans as objects […]
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You Can’t Will Attentiveness
You Can’t Will Attentiveness The idea that humans have an individual power (will) to override: the world around us, cultural heritage, history, social influence, technique design and emotions is a construct of an Augustinian/Cartesian worldview. All of the latest research in neuroscience, cognition and social psychology makes it clear that the idea of an individual […]
