Debates and politics in safety science

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The early works on organisational and social science approaches to safety date back to the 1970s, but safety research as a systematic, scientific field is still relatively young. Since then, safety research has gone through various phases with distinct focus areas. As a result, the three ages of safety are frequently mentioned, each of which is distinguished by a different focus, a different category of attributed causes for accidents, and a different research scope. Safety research entered the age of organisational attention, which included topics like safety culture and safety management systems, after the first, technological age of safety, was followed by the age of human factors. The social science approach to safety really increased in volume and perspectives after society entered the age of organizations, in particular. This development was fuelled by a number of organisational accidents that occurred in the 1980s. These accidents led to extensive research efforts aimed at developing theories of risk and safety that reflected the changes in the complexity of industrial sociotechnical systems as well as determining the causes of the accidents.

These debates' central contentions are well-known subject matter, and they have remained remarkably stable over time, suggesting that there are still unresolved issues there. However, there has been much criticism of these discussions, questioning if there are truly significant and well-defined differences between the underlying assumptions in the various traditions. For example, it has been argued that the function of public exposure of high reliability organisations and the authorised or plausible variances in system behaviour are not fully taken into account when referring to incidents as normal and anomalous and require a control mode that is centralised. These criteria might lead to organisational inconsistencies since sociotechnical systems cannot be centralised and decentralised at the same time. As a result, systems which are both tightly connected and cognitively complicated cannot be managed in a secure way over the long term. Highly Reliable Organizations are defined by two separate characteristics: cultural and structural organisational redundancies, as well as the capacity to autonomously and largely effortlessly go from a mode of central control to a mode of decentralised control when confronted with a crisis.