۱- Introduction

۲- Safety culture regulation in three sectors

۳- Theoretical approach

۴- Methodological approach

۵- Results

۶- Discussion

۷- Conclusion

References

Abstract

The relationship between safety culture and safety outcomes is well documented across industries and countries, and regulators in different industries have increasingly included safety culture in their repertory. Safety culture is, however, a fairly new regulatory concept, and it seems that knowledge is lacking on pros and cons and expected outcomes of strategies that regulatory authorities can use to improve safety culture. The aims of our study are therefore to: (1) Map descriptions of regulatory efforts to influence safety culture in companies; (2) Identify strategies employed by regulatory authorities to influence safety culture; (3) Describe (regulators’ and companies’) experiences with, and results of the strategies; (4) Discuss pros and cons of the strategies (possibilities and challenges). The paper also provides a more general discussion of whether it is possible to regulate safety culture, and subsequently what it means to regulate safety culture. The paper is based on experiences from three sectors that have introduced safety culture in their regulatory repertory: (1) The Norwegian petroleum industry, (2) North American rail, and (3) The nuclear industry. The experiences are studied in a systematic literature review reported according to PRISMA guidelines. Our discussion indicates that to include safety culture in the regulatory repertory may involve a range of different strategies, e.g. auditing safety culture, introducing new rules, providing information, providing assistance with self-measurements etc. The study identifies and discusses 5 rule-based and 6 advisory-based strategies that regulators may utilize when attempting to influence organizational safety culture.

Background and aims

The relationship between organizational safety culture/climate and safety outcomes is robustly documented in studies reporting experiences across organizations, industries and countries (Zohar, 2010). The crucial importance of safety culture is also documented in a range of accident investigations (e.g. Cullen, 1990; NASA, 2003; National Commission of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2011). Safety culture generally refers to safety relevant aspects of culture in organizations (Hale, 2000). Although several different definitions of safety culture exist, most of them concern shared and safety relevant ways of thinking or acting that are (re)created through the joint negotiation of people in social settings (cf. Cooper, 2000; Guldenmund, 2000; Nævestad, 2010a), which is the definition we follow in the present study. Safety climate refers to manifestations or snapshots of safety culture, usually obtained by means of quantitative surveys (Flin et al., 2000; Guldenmund, 2007). As a consequence of the increased acceptance of safety culture as a decisive factor for organizational safety, regulators in different industries have increasingly started to focus on safety culture in their audits and in their contact with companies (Kongsvik et al., 2016; Antonsen et al., 2017). This applies for instance to Norwegian petroleum authorities (Kringen, 2009), North American railroad safety authorities (Amtrak, 2015; Lewis et al., 2007) and the Swedish Transport Safety Authority (Nævestad and Phillips, 2018). Regulators in the nuclear sector were probably the first to focus on the concept after it was launched by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the wake of the Chernobyl accident. IAEA has provided several guidelines, tools and publications since then, to support regulatory authorizes in its member states (IAEA, 1991, 2002, 2016). Safety culture is, however, a fairly new regulatory concept, as it only in recent years has become used among regulators from several different sectors, in addition to the nuclear sector.