ABSTRACT
The notion of safety culture arose from the more inclusive concept of organizational culture (Cooper 2000) as well as the related concepts of organizational climate and safety climate. Organizational culture is often held to be critical to an organization’s success or failure, while safety culture has been identified as part of the constellation of management and organizational factors critical to safety within the rail industry (Cox et al. 2003). Safety culture is frequently identified, for example by disaster inquiries, as being fundamental to an organization’s ability to manage safety-related aspects of its operations — successfully or otherwise.
