Safety Management - A Qualitative Systems Approach

Professionals striving for accident reduction must deal with systems in which both technical and human elements play equal and complementary roles. However, many of the existing techniques in ergonomics and risk management concentrate on plant and technical issues and downplay human factors and "subjectivity." Safety Management: A Qualitative Systems Approach describes a body of theories and data that addresses safety by drawing on systems theory and applied psychology, stressing the importance of human activity within systems. It explains in detail the central roles of social consensus and reliability and the nature of verbal reports and functional discourse.

This text presents a new approach to safety management, offering a path to both greater safety and to economic savings. It presents a series of methodological tools that have proven to be reliable through extensive use in the rail and nuclear industries. These methods allow organizational and systems failures to be analyzed much more effectively in terms of quantity, precision, and usefulness.

The concepts and tools described in this book are particularly valuable for reliability engineers, risk managers, human factors specialists, and safety managers and professionals in safety-critical organizations.

List of contents

. Safety, Risk and Responsibility. Safety, Subjectivity and Imagination. Predictive Validity of Near Misses. Confidential Reporting as an Approach to Collecting Near Miss Data. Numbers and Words in Safety Management. Hermeneutics and Accident Reports. Causal Attribution and Safety Management. Inter-Rater Consensus in Safety Management. Error Taxonomies and 'Cognitivism'. Information Arousal Theory (IAT) and Train Driver Behavior. Conclusions.

About the author

Davies, John; Ross, Alastair; Wallace, Brendan; Wallace, Brendan

Summary

Safety Management argues that it is the methodologies of the human sciences that are more suitable for providing a firm basis for safety management and offers new approaches to safety management in accordance with this view.

Product details

• Authors: John Davies, Davies John, Alastair Ross, Ross Alastair, Brendan Wallace, Wallace Brendan, Linda Wright
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 15.05.2003
• EAN: 9780415303705
• ISBN: 978-0-415-30370-5
• No. of pages: 240
• Weight: 498 g
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Psychology > Applied psychology; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Technology > General, dictionaries; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Decision-Making & Problem Solving, PSYCHOLOGY / Industrial & Organizational Psychology, TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Industrial Health & Safety, Occupational and industrial psychology, Occupational & industrial psychology, Management decision making, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Labor / General, Health & safety issues, Health and safety in the workplace