The terms ‘culture’ and particularly ‘safety culture’ are widely used yet misunderstood. A better understanding can make workplaces safer.
About this seminar
An organisation’s ‘culture’ consists of the values and behaviours that workers share and demonstrate. It can include the shared attitudes and beliefs that form part of the organisation’s written and unwritten rules.
In this broadcast, Professor Andrew Hopkins argues that inconsistent and contradictory use of the terms ‘culture’ and ‘safety culture’ has created confusion.
Drawing on broader, social science definitions of culture, Professor Hopkins makes six propositions to improve our understanding of these terms:
- Culture is a characteristic of groups, not individuals.
- The influence of national cultures is overstated.
- Culture is best described as ‘the ways we do things around here’.
- In organisations, it is usually better to treat culture as a description of group behaviour, because that invites the deeper question - why are they behaving in this way?
- The sources of organisational culture are structure and leadership.
- Existing definitions of safety culture are inadequate, and should focus on organisational practices and getting them right.
This presentation featured as a keynote address at the 2018 SafetyConnect Conference.
Who is this seminar for?
This seminar is relevant for:
- WHS academics
- WHS safety research bodies
- WHS regulators (including industry-specific regulators)
- employers
- unions and employee representatives
- professional WHS training organisations.
About the presenter (at the time of the presentation)
Emeritus Professor Andrew Hopkins
Andrew Hopkins is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra.
He was an expert witness at the Royal Commission into the 1998 Exxon gas plant explosion near Melbourne. He was a consultant to the US Chemical Safety Board in its investigation of the BP Texas City Refinery disaster of 2005, and also for its investigation into the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010. He has written books about all these accidents. More than 90,000 copies of his books have been sold.
He has been involved in various government WHS reviews and has done consultancy work for major companies in the mining, petroleum, chemical and electrical industries, as well as for Defence. He speaks regularly to audiences around the world about the human and organisational causes of major accidents.
He has a BSc and an MA from the Australian National University, a PhD from the University of Connecticut and is a Fellow of the Safety Institute of Australia.
He was the winner of the 2008 European Process Safety Centre safety award, the first time it was awarded to someone outside Europe.
He is an honorary fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers in recognition of his “outstanding contributions to process safety and to the analysis of process safety related incidents”.