Industrial safety engineering—Challenges of the future

Abstract

Safety management is now entering an era quite different to that which marked its foundation. The multiple challenges facing safety engineering are focused upon. In the United States, France, Britain, and Brazil, safety engineering has experienced fast growth over the past two decades. An increased questioning of the traditional assumptions of the profession in both traditional and postindustrial work has accompanied this growth. New directions of reflection and research are being pursued. Recent research in sociology, where worker perceptions of tasks and their dangers are incorporated into the analysis of accident production, brings promising but still incipient new perspectives to accident research and theory. Simultaneously, novel challenges for safety engineering are posed by the emergence of postindustrial technologies. Some of these threaten large civilian populations, and the knowledge is not currently available to guarantee accident prevention. In this way the responsibilities of safety engineering, both ethical and with regards the provision of information to the public, are brought under the spotlight. The face of safety engineering is being changed.