When safety culture backfires: Unintended consequences of half-shared governance in a high tech workplace

Abstract

This paper applies concepts from the sociology and anthropology of organizations to understand limits to the implementation of a more effective safety culture in the workplace. It highlights unintended consequences of combining bureaucratic control and shared governance and identifies sources of inertia within already existing safety cultures. The data come from focus group interviews with workers in a research and development facility of a multinational corporation in the Western U.S. It is found that safety protocols, rules, and rhetoric, combined with efforts to give workers more responsibility for safety in the workplace, create tendencies toward worker alienation, shame with regard to injuries, complacency, and fear of bureaucratic processes. Therefore it appears that some efforts to create safety culture in the workplace may unintentionally undermine the goal of manufacturing safety.

Notes

1 The moniker “half-shared” simply implies “partially shared,” connoting organizations’ claims that they have shared responsibility with workers, but yet have not fully relinquished it. The phrase is not intended to indicate a mathematical estimate of shared control. This phrase is rooted in recent observations that many organizations use the rhetoric of empowerment and shared governance, but fail to fully implement it, going only half way (see Edwards & Collinson, 2002; Heller et al., 1998).

2 Hereafter, words in quotation marks should be read as direct quotes and vocabulary used by Westech employees.