Professionals striving for accident reduction must deal with systems in which both technical and human elements play equal and complementary roles. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant and technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity." Safety Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach describes a body of theories and data that addresses safety by drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, stressing the importance of human activity within systems. It explains in detail the central roles of social consensus and reliability and the nature of verbal reports and functional discourse. This text presents a new approach to safety management, offering a path to both greater safety and to economic savings. It presents a series of methodological tools that have proven to be reliable through extensive use in the rail and nuclear industries. These methods allow organizational and systems failures to be analyzed much more effectively in terms of quantity, precision, and usefulness.
The concepts and tools described in this book are particularly valuable for reliability engineers, risk managers, human factors specialists, and safety managers and professionals in safety-critical organizations.
Table of Contents
Safety, Risk and Responsibility Science and Subjectivity The Need to be Safe Risk and Responsibility Voluntary and Involuntary Action Safety and Trust in Organizations Better Value from Safety Data in a World of Diminishing Returns Where is Risk Situated? Safety, Subjectivity and Imagination Knowledge: Objective or Subjective? What Kind of Science? Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Causality: a Property of the World, or All in the Mind? Safety and Imagination Justifying Proactive Safety Predictive Validity of Near Misses Introduction The Background to the Common Sense Hypothesis Arguments against the Common Cause Hypothesis Testing the Hypothesis Collecting and Analyzing Minor Event Reports is a Useful Thing to Do Confidential Reporting as an Approach to Collecting Near Miss Data Why Confidential Reporting? Management Support Incentives for Reporting Preparation and Planning The CIRAS Reporting System Conclusions Numbers and Words in Safety Management Introduction Triangulation The Epistemology of Incident Frequency Data Case Study: Validatory Triangulation in a Safety Management Context Dealing with Discourse Summary Hermeneutics and Accident Reports Background Hermeneutics An Organizational Model of Human Factors The CIRAS Project Kinds of Data From Hermeneutics to Action Causal Attribution and Safety Management Traditional Attribution Theory Functional Discourse and Attribution Causal Investigation of Accidents Viewed as a Functional Act Attribution and Safety Climate/Culture An Attributional Analysis of Train Drivers' Explanations Attributions and Implications Inter-Rater Consensus in Safety Management Introduction Definitions of Reliability Problem Areas in Testing Consensus Statistical Measurements of Inter-Rater Consensus Procedures for Establishing Inter-Rater Consensus (IRC) and Within- Rater Consensus (WRC) Summary Error Taxonomies and 'Cognitivism' Origins Cognitivism Connectionism Information Arousal Theory (IAT) and Train Driver Behavior People: Controllers of Arousal Further Implications Conclusions Numbers from Words Reliability Taxonomies Human Error, Strategic Decision or Adaptive Action? It Makes Economic Sense Science: Induction versus Intuition Catalog no. TF1634, May 2003, 240 pp., ISBN: 0-4153-0370-2, $109.95 / GBP72.99 Short TOC
