No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

How, if at all, is it possible to assess aspects of organizational culture and the way culture influences safety? This question concerns the possibility of proactive assessments: whether it is possible to 'predict' if an organization is prone to having major accidents on the basis of safety culture assessments. The article presents an empirical analysis of this question by comparing the results of a quantitative safety culture assessment on the Norwegian oil and gas platform Snorre Alpha, with the results of a qualitative investigation after a major incident on the platform. The two descriptions of the same culture are dramatically different. The lack of concurrence between the two descriptions suggests that safety culture surveys may have little predictive value.

Safety management regulation is an important supplement to market forces to establish a sufficient safety level in high-risk industries. The accident statistics in Norwegian maritime passenger transportation display a paradox: personal injuries have decreased while ship accidents have increased in the period during which safety management has been regulated (the International Safety Management Code was effectuated in the late 1990s). We interview regulators, shipping company management, and crewmembers about their practices and opinions regarding safety management regulation and use these data to explore how this regulation influences safety management practices to prevent different types of accidents. This study underlines earlier research showing that regulation serves to 'raise the bar' by heightening the industry levels of safety investments and organizational safety awareness. In addition, our results suggest that safety management regulation in maritime transportation is mostly effective for preventing personal injuries in cases in which the personal have sufficient time and resources available, and the procedures are consistent with seafarers' professional values. For ship accidents, such as groundings, other causal factors come into play. We find that the negative consequences of regulation (proceduralization) in particular influence the performance of safety-critical tasks, such as navigation. This may explain why personal injuries have decreased while ship accident frequencies have continued to increase in spite of the regulations aimed at improving safety.

New public management has led to major institutional changes in the sectors operating critical infrastructures. The previously integrated utility companies have been dismantled and are now run, regulated and organized more like private entities. This paper proposes two concepts that may aid the analysis of these organizational changes and the consequences they may have on societal safety. Commoditization refers to the process where work is sought transformed into atomistic standardized products to be ordered on a market. Modularization refers to the creation of discrete entities coordinated by market mechanisms and standardized interfaces. We argue that commoditization of work and modularization of organizational entities pose challenges to some of the informal characteristics of high-reliability organization's, with recognized importance especially for crisis management. This is illustrated by examples from Norwegian electricity network operators.

No abstract

Based on a study of reliability consequences of New Public Management (NPM) reforms in Norwegian critical infrastructure sectors, this article suggests that the discourse of work found in NPM renders essential aspects of operational work invisible -including practices that are known to be of importance for reliability. We identify two such organizationally 'invisible' characteristics of operational work: the ongoing situational coordination required for keeping a water supply system or an electricity grid running, and the aggregating operational history within which this happens. In the reorganized infrastructure sectors, these crucial aspects of operational work fit poorly in market oriented organizational models and control mechanisms. More generally, our analysis contributes to the understanding of how some types of work fit poorly within the discourse of work found in NPM.