This article examines the social-scientific concept of organisational culture as preamble for the, now popular, construct of safety culture. In accordance with American organisational scientist Edgar Schein safety culture will be operarionalised as a phenomenon that manifests itself at three levels - artefacts, espoused values and basic assumptions. In the end it is the basic assumptions that steer thinking and acting in an organisation and that will be the ultimate goal of the safety culture investigation. Safety culture manifests itself explicitly in the way an organisation tackles safety problems. This article discusses a three-step approach towards the diagnosis of safety culture. This article is the first in a series of two articles on safety culture. The second article discusses the results of an inquiry of safety culture at a steel plant (Swuste ea., 2002). (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting