Carsten Busch
Carsten Busch
Head Mythologist
Mind The Risk
Safety Concepts: What Drives Safety Professionals to Adopt Them?
To improve and manage safety, organisations need concepts that inform them about ways to do so. It is assumed that safety professionals play a major role in selecting and suggesting appropriate safety concepts to the organisations that employ or consult them. Some of these safety concepts gain widespread adoption over time, even despite their contribution to improvement may be questioned.
Knowledge of what influences adoption of safety concepts has major professional and social relevance. This knowledge can contribute to more effective processes, facilitate adoption of concepts, inform policy makers about adoption processes, and ultimately lead to more effective interventions to create safety and reduce harm.
Though safety professionals have been the subject of a significant amount of academic work, there still is a limited understanding of their current role and practice within organisations. This includes their adoption of safety concepts. Apart from some studies exploring the research/practice-gap in safety and related domains, isomorphism in safety management, and the suggestion of a “safety market”, not much is known about what influences safety professionals to adopt (or reject/ignore) certain concepts.
This research explores what factors make safety professionals consider certain safety concepts as appropriate. The adoption of safety concepts needs to be understood on various levels to address the interplay between individual and institutional factors. Therefore, this study follows a multilevel approach, investigating micro, meso, and macro levels: the individual, including the effect of emotions, the interpersonal, the influence of organisations and institutions the individual is embedded in and the wider environmental context.
The presentation will discuss existing knowledge, explain some of the theory that influences the research, and contain a thought experiment regarding the increasing popularity of HOP (Human Organizational Performance), based on guru theory, illustrating different reasons for adoption.
Carsten Busch has studied Mechanical Engineering, Safety, and Human Factors. He has over 30 years of experience in Safety and Quality Management at various levels in organisations ranging from railway to oil & gas to police in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Norway.
He is professionally active on various forums, regular speaker at conferences, owner of mindtherisk.com, tutor at the Lund University Human Factors and System Safety program, and author of several professional books: Safety Myth 101, Veiligheidsfabels 1–2–3, If You Can’t Measure It… Maybe You Shouldn’t, Preventing Industrial Accidents, The First Rule of Safety Culture, Risicoflectie, and The Heinrich Project III: The Travelers Papers.
His main research interests include the history of knowledge development and discourse in safety. His MSc thesis, critically discussing new views in safety against the work of safety pioneer H.W. Heinrich was elected as best safety thesis in Sweden of 2019. He is an active members of the Dutch society of safety science (NVVK), a member of the editorial board of the society’s quarterly magazine NVVK Info and acts a reviewer for Safety Science and the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management.
Currently, he is doing his PhD through Open Universiteit in the Netherlands, researching the adoption of safety concepts.