Safety Culture: Assessing and Changing the Behaviour of Organisations

Facility safety is an important commercial risk and it has to be managed insists John Taylor in Safety Culture. Following an accident, the lack of a 'good' safety management system, compounded by a 'poor' safety culture, is a charge often laid on organisations. Accidents can take up to thirty percentage points off annual profits and, often, failure to manage safety has a much larger social cost that can involve fatalities or serious injury to members of the workforce and public. This has been starkly demonstrated in the railway industry, the international atomic energy industry, and through events in the oil exploration and refinery industry. In business terms, the ultimate cost can be receivership.

Safety Culture highlights examples ranging from the loss of the Titanic, to Bhopal, and the Tokaimura criticality event. In it Dr Taylor argues that to minimise risks, any hazardous facility requires robustly engineered safety systems, an effective management system and a developed organisational safety culture. Safety culture is a complex social/scientific concept and Dr Taylor demystifies it with reference to theory normally associated with mainstream business development and change processes. Sections of the book deal with using safety culture theory as a predictive model, the assessment of safety culture, and how to influence culture change to produce the desired organisational behaviours.

This is a practically focused book from an author with vast experience at the top level of high hazard industries, he brings together current academic thinking on the concept of safety culture and provides authoritative practical guidance for operational executives, managers and for students in science, safety technology and engineering disciplines.