ABSTRACT
The energy sector is generally known for its relatively conservative approach to safety. Cardinal rules (or golden rules, or life-saving rules), for instance, have seen widespread adoption across the industry. These rules require unconditional compliance all the time, sometimes under the threat 178of personal sanctions for violations. In other words, if people are ‘caught' not following one of the rules, they can risk being fired or denied further work on the contract. After an initial hausse, the effects of such rules (and their consequences for people's employment) have appeared to be wearing off (Dekker & Pitzer, 2016). There are now concerns that the retributive mechanism they embody is giving rise to cultures of risk secrecy, in which the open, non-jeopardy discussion of obstacles, constraints, goal conflicts and difficulties of work is hampered. This is further connected to a preoccupation with injury and incident numbers as the industry's dominant putative safety metric (Lofquist, 2010; Muller, 2018). Keeping these numbers low (or even bringing them down to ‘zero') is incentivized in various ways – in part by disincentivizing the open disclosure and honest treatment of injuries and incidents (Hopkins, 2015). This has led to practices and industry-wide learning disabilities which have been connected to various large-scale disasters in recent times (Baker, 2007; CSB., 2016; Hopkins, 2010).
