Safety-Culture Background and Concept: The Chernobyl Disaster

1422 WordsJan 27, 20186 Pages
Introduction Great strides towards a safe workplace environment have been made in the construction industry. Hinze (1997) assume that the written safety plans have the potential to be very effective, but companies ought to go ahead of the safety plan and build a suitable “safety culture”. The construction industry offers a thrilling and dynamic atmosphere. The flow of exclusive projects, the on-site operational environment, and the inventiveness and innovation required to solve one-off troubles require a creative approach to work which is seldom found elsewhere. The problem of safety culture - What is it and how do you become one? - is probably the main issue in modern thinking about safety (Turner and Pidgeon, 1997). Most attention has been paid to the issue of safety climate (Zohar, 1980), a concept easier to measure, but the underlying expectation is that the best and safest organizations have a safety culture, and safety climate which is an indirect measure of how close an organisation approximates to that. Safety-Culture Background& Concept The emergence of safety culture came after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident which triggered the fusion of the two concepts, safety and culture. This event applied an approach about looking beyond immediate engineering and technical failures and brought into focus the performance of ‘the person’, designing, managing, constructing or operating risky facilities. Only then, the psychology of ‘why people behave as they

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