Safety and Risk Management at Work: The Search for Culturally and Institutionally Embedded Solutions

Abstract

There have been significant efforts made to understand the relationship between national culture and safety. However, the results on how to act upon these findings are meager. This article discusses the research paradigms that produce circular reasoning on culture as an object of analysis and proposes an alternative approach to organizing the observation of the concrete life-situation using an ethnomethodology, which can provide empirical evidence of causalities, thus making way for improvements. Based on a multi-case study, it is argued that the features of large power distance, high uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 2001) and low trust (WVS, 2015), when combined in a national culture, can produce negative effects on the learning capacity of individuals and teams and on their information-treating capabilities. Observation of practices reveals the negative consequences of excessive controls and its effect on producing fragmentation in the necessary tacit relationship that should exist between meaning, experience and the concrete facts observed in daily work situations at the bottom of the organization, thus creating a context for the normalization of deviance in organizations (Vaughan, 1999). National culture can engender a context in which there are many hidden risks and this should be considered in a typology of organizational errors.