Sucking on the Same Old Safety Bottle
I see posts about culture in safety and about ‘safety culture’ often articulated by voices with no expertise in the social sciences, Poetics or culture. Strange this industry that seeks views on culture through the narrow band of engineering, mechanistic disciplines and mechanistic worldviews. Most of the associations in safety were named as ‘safety engineering’ until recently.
When we think of organizations and disciplines that mature we think of ‘growing up’, ‘embracing diversity’ and ‘maturation’. Safety as a young discipline has such a need for maturation and is one of its greatest challenges.
I can think of no other discipline so confined to its own fortress of compliance and fear and inability to shift beyond its own boundaries than this safety industry. When compliance is made the measure of belonging to a group, then the group stagnates, it can never grow up and will never have vision (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/envisioning-risk-seeing-vision-and-meaning-in-risk/ ). We see the boundaries already set for this industry in a weak and narrow Body of Knowledge and Curriculum. When you keep a baby off solid foods it can’t grow up and Safety is still very much on the safety bottle.
The evidence for the immaturity of Safety is overwhelming. This is evidenced in the many juvenile and pathetic PR campaigns that define its identity (https://safetyrisk.net/doing-something-bad-well/). We see this immaturity in its addiction to a narrow behaviorist/positivist paradigm that continues to ignore all the evidence of disciplines such as Anthropology, Education, Linguistics, Semiotics, Religion/Theology, Post-Structuralism, Social Politics and Neuropsychology. Safety grabs simplistic ideas like Swiss Cheese, Bradley Curve, Risk Matrix, Bow-Tie and makes them immovable doctrine. Similarly, in culture it grabs beginning ideas and makes them the whole picture.
When it comes to understanding culture the work of Edgar Schein is a good start but only a start. As much as Schein is a pioneer of cultural studies he is not the beginning and end of cultural studies indeed, in many ways his ideas on culture are quite dated. Anchoring to Schein’s 3 factor model becomes a limiting paradigm and this is what Safety tends to do. Safety defines a body of knowledge by what it can control and simplify not by what is available. Openness to learning is the enemy of compliance.
There are a host of critical issues in cultural studies completely omitted by the Schein model of culture. Culture is NOT the combination of Psychological, Behavioural and Situational aspects. As long as Safety continues to mis-define culture it will continue to think it can control and manage it. I recently saw a supposed list of the top 10 factors critical to managing culture and safety and I wouldn’t include one of them in a focus on culture.
Similarly, the AIHS BoK on Culture 10.2.1 is extremely narrow and limiting in its understanding of culture. The starting point for this chapter in the BoK is the acceptance of safety orthodoxy and associated mechanistic worldview. There is no Transdisciplinary approach at all (https://safetyrisk.net/transdisciplinary-safety/). Indeed, the Chapter starts by accepting the worldview and constructs of Schein. The gaps in approach and assumptions explore nothing of Semiotic, Religion/Theology or Linguistics thereby keeping the approach to culture to definitions of layers and levels, behaviours, generalist psychology and context. I know of no studies globally on culture that would think it was a good idea to omit religious studies from a study of culture. This is one reason why Safety doesn’t understand its own religiosity, a sure fired way to keep one’s head in the sand and keep sucking on the safety bottle.
Of course, all of the discussion ignores the linguistics of accepted models and language such as ‘culture is what we do around here’. Indeed, there is no condemnation of this misleading language just as the AIHS BoK on Ethics model endorses Natural Law ethics by ‘check your gut’ – ignoring much of what is available in Ethics research (https://safetyrisk.net/the-aihs-bok-and-ethics-check-your-gut/ ).
Quoting Schein on page 8 it states that culture is:
… a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
Again, setting Schein as the benchmark for discussion the Chapter limits questioning and its own boundaries for discussion. Schein’s classic omission of religious studies from his understanding of culture is another significant limitation.
By the time the discussion gets to the idea of ‘positive safety culture’ (p. 9) many essentials and critical ideas about culture have been excluded and a ‘format’ is developed obviously leading to the notion that culture can be understood, measured and controlled in a certain way. Ra, Ra Safety you’ve done it once again.
The literature study for this Chapter is extremely limited remaining within the boundaries of acceptable safety Discourse including reference to Reason’s cultural ‘types’ and Hudson’s ‘stages’. Imagine doing a study of culture and leaving out research by the likes of Eliade and Douglas?
So, we get to the end of the BoK on Culture left with some simple constructs that will keep Safety happy and narrow. The metaphorical nature of culture language is not discussed, the depth of semiotic understanding of culture (https://monoskop.org/images/5/5e/Lotman_Yuri_M_Universe_of_the_Mind_A_Semiotic_Theory_of_Culture_1990.pdf) is not discussed and of course no notion of religious Discourse within the addiction to zero or the denial of fallibility. The guiding mantra for the BoK is to leave the sacred ideology of zero untouched. At no stage does a Transdisciplinary approach to culture enter any discussion in the BoK chapter on culture. In this way Safety can keep culture measured and controlled governed by ‘what we do around here’.
All of this helps Safety keep to the three ways, 5 steps, four stages, 3 circles and related dogma it has constructed over the past 20 years. Indeed, as part of its culture all the sacred things can remain untouched – Safety rituals, mantras, semiotics, metaphorical Discourse, pyramids, curves and constructed mythology can remain untouched.
In this way all remains safe and secure, we know what we need to know and there is nothing outside of the safety discipline that we need to know. So, consult the same old sources within the same old club and all will be well, and keep sucking on the same old safety bottle.
Dr Rob Long
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Bernard Corden says
James Reason implies that a safety culture can be engineered and Edgar Schein believes it cannot so safety resorts to the neo Kantian thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, which Karl Marx referred to as the “Wooden Trichotomies”. It can hardly be described as transdisciplinary.
Rob Long says
Both Reason’s and Schein’s models of culture are pretty much beginner 101 when it comes to culture. and you are right, Safefty is addicted to the neo-Kantian Discourse.
Bernard Corden says
And it has the gall to market its trash as continual professional development