Safety Culture, Shared Values and Practices. Marianne Abramovici, Doctoral Student at Groupe de Recherche sur le Risque, l'Information et la Decision, Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, France, 61, avenue du President Wilson, 94 235 Cachan cedex., telephone +33 1.47.40.21.79, fax +33 1.47.40.23.48, e-mail abramov@grid.ens-cachan.fr
This paper presents the main results of applied research conducted in the French railway industry. The aim of this study was to render explicit the influence mechanism (Abramovici and Bourrier, 1998) justifying the decision to change the organisation of the Invalides train control section to improve safety. We conducted semi-structured interviews, observations and systematic measurements of social representations (cf. Poumadere and Mays, 1988; Mays and Poumadere, 1989). Our results show three dimension strongly related to safety for the operators of this system: respect of the rules, individual mastery of work and collective mastery of work. These results were mostly coherent with the hypothesis used by the managers of the system to justify their organisational choices. The consensus around what were perceived as appropriate ways to improve safety leads us to address the concept of safety culture (cf. Schein, 1990; Pidgeon, 1998). We found that the methodology we used could be an adequate way to better understand the culture of a specific system, mainly because it does not require the predetermination of what a safety culture should be. In the light of this study, we will discuss the relationship between safety culture and safety practices in complex organisation.
Abramovici M., Bourrier M., 1998, Beyond the black box : Organisational factors in probabilistic risk assessment methods, Annual Conference of Society for Risk Analysis: Risk Analysis: opening the process Paris.
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Pidgeon N., 1998, Safety culture: Key theoretical issues, Work and Stress, vol 6799, p. 12 244 -12 259.
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