ABSTRACT
The history of safety revolves around the way in which we see the role of the individual in accident causation and prevention. Fundamentalist religions in many ages and countries have seen accidents as the punishment for sins and prevention as the need to pray and live a Godfearing life. The 1930s saw the flowering of the theory of accident proneness1, which sought the major causes of accidents in innate or learned characteristics of individuals, and prevention in careful selection, job placement and early training. There is still an obsession with blame in some companies and in sensational media headlines. The fact that the blame still focuses most often on the last person to touch the system (the operator, driver, pilot) indicates that elements of the accident prone view of individuals still haunt us. Ergonomics, from the 1950s onwards, changed our focus to the human-technology interface, rather than the individual alone2. Since the 1980s there has been an increasing interest in the behaviour of managers and supervisors as individuals vital in the control and management of safety. We have come to see individual behaviour in relation to safety as something conditioned by the whole social and organisational environment, and something which can be managed. The turn of the century has seen organisational safety culture as the fashionable topic for study and concern. Now we are trying to influence and steer the collective attitudes and beliefs of a whole department or organisation in a direction favourable to safety3. Figure 2.7.1 illustrates these changing views of accident cause and prevention.
