Humanising Safety and Embracing Real Risk
How Groupthink Works In light of the binary discourse that is floating about my last blog, Like A Collective Brain Snap, this may serve as a follow up. People often scratch their heads wondering why people do things and in exasperation and dismissal come up with the traditional stupidity/idiot causation scenario. This kind of binary […]
Until Nothing Changes in Safety The industry of safety becomes more and more fixed in its current trajectory through its linguistic practices, semiotic meanings and social reproduction. What does this mean? Humans are the sum of their social relationships and the language that is used to communicate identity. Safety articulates itself through a discourse of […]
Target Trade-Offs and Numeric Goals We learn recently that Victorian Police – a supposed institution of trust, has fabricated numbers over the past 5 years in order to meet targets. It is reported today that Victoria Police have fabricated 258,000 breath tests in order to meet targets. How is this relevant for safety? I hear […]
Forking Safety It’s not that often that Safework can give you a chuckle, most times what circulates is more a recipe for acute depression. However, this time a laugh is warranted (http://www.safework.nsw.gov.au/health-and-safety/safety-topics-a-z/forklifts?hootPostID=f514668ae2919264b9febc146ca11ba0). If you were wondering what to do about forklift safety apparently is all forked. That is, if you get hit by a forklift […]
Safety Cries Wolf! Why is Safety so easily sucked into the practice of creating fear? It must be challenging to constantly talk of ‘care’ while at the same time acting in a way that induces anxiety. How does Safety manage this contradiction? How does it cope with the tension? Does Safety understand what this is […]
Like a Rhizome Cowboy For those who know much about the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze they will know that a central part of his philosophy is the idea of a Rhizome. A rhizome is a tangled web of knotted stems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome) hidden below the surface. The rhizome is the perfect metaphor for Deleuzian philosophy but […]
