ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an illustration of why the broadening of perspectives on the human element and safety is essential, and must include organizational as well as individual factors. It considers some of the implications of the concept of safety culture for aviation practice, relating this to the question of institutional or organizational design for safety. Interest in the term ‘safety culture’ can be traced directly to the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the former Soviet Union and the response of the Western nuclear industries to the human and organizational causes of the disaster. The closely related notion of ‘climate of safety’ has had a somewhat longer pedigree however. K. H. Roberts points out that linking culture with reliability and risk in turn raises novel theoretical issues, since concerns for safety, responsibility and accountability do not appear in traditional organizational culture accounts in social science.
