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a b s t r a c tWorkers in the steel-manufacturing industry face many safety risks due to the nature of the job. How well safety procedures and regulations are followed within an organization is considered to be influenced by the reigning culture of the organization. The aim of this study was to investigate and describe safety culture and risk-taking at a large steel-manufacturing company in Sweden by exploring workers' experiences and perceptions of safety and risks. Ten focus group interviews were conducted with a total of 66 workers. In the interviews, the situation of safety at work was discussed in a semi-structured manner. The material was analyzed inductively using qualitative content analysis. The analysis resulted in a thorough description of safety culture and risk-taking at the company, based on the following five main categories: 1. Acceptance of risks, one simply has to accept the safety risks of the work environment, 2. Individual responsibility for safety, the responsibility for safe procedures rests to the largest extent on the individual, 3. Trade-off between productivity and safety, these are conflicting entities, wanting to produce as well as wanting to work safely, 4. Importance of communication, it is needed for safety actions to be effective, and 5. State-of-the-day and external conditions, an interplay between these factors affect risk-taking. In sociotechnical systems theory it is acknowledged that there are interactions between social and technical factors in organizations. The findings of this study are interpreted to be in line with a sociotechnical understanding of safety culture and risk-taking.

BACKGROUND:Earlier studies suggest that the quality of handling occupational health and safety (OHS) activities differs between companies of different sizes. Company size is a proxy variable for other variables affecting OHS performance.OBJECTIVE:The objective of this study was to investigate if there is an association between company size and perceptions of work environment prioritizations.METHODS:Data from 106 small- and medium-sized Swedish manufacturing companies was collected. One manager and one safety delegate at each company rated different aspects of their companies’ work environment prioritizations with a 43-item questionnaire. Ratings were aggregated to a summary statistic for each company before analysis.RESULTS:No significant differences in perceptions of priority were found to be associated with company sizes. This is in contrast to earlier studies of objective differences. The respondents in small companies, however, showed significantly greater consensus in their ratings.CONCLUSIONS:Company size does not appear to be associated with perceptions of work environment prioritizations. Company size is an important proxy variable to study in order to understand what factors enable and obstruct safe and healthy workplaces. The work presented here should be viewed as an initial exploration to serve as direction for future academic work.

This study investigated the attention and priority accorded to factors of work environment within manufacturing companies, as perceived by managers and safety delegates at small-and medium-sized enterprises. Representatives from 142 Swedish manufacturing companies answered a 43-item questionnaire covering seven areas of the work environment and a priority-ranking question of company interests. Respondents (n = 249) rated the present situation and the situation one year earlier, using a visual analogue scale. The findings showed that both managers and safety delegates ranked profitability as the main company interest. Respondents rated the priorities of the work environment currently as higher than one year earlier (p = < 0.05). Managers rated the priorities of the work environment higher than did the safety delegates (p = < 0.05). We conclude that the two professional roles, manager and safety delegate, differ in their perceptions regarding to what extent different work environment factors are being attended to. C 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Focus group interviews were conducted at a large steel manufacturing company with 1000 employees, in order to answer the research question: what is the safety culture and risk-taking like at the company, according to employees? Ten focus groups were used for data collection consisting of 6-8 employees each. The participants were operators from production. The interviews lasted 75 min and were digitally recorded and thereafter verbatim transcribed. Descriptive data was also collected from all participants by allowing them to fill out a short questionnaire. The results of this study will be presented at the conference as a poster presentation.

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