Hardbound. Not only is technology going through its revolutions faster, but the institutions and organisations which exploit that technology are also in the process of almost constant reshaping. This accelerating change is a double-edged sword for safety. On the one hand it offers the opportunity for improvement, but on the other it threatens the tried and trusted measures which have produced high safety levels in the past.Trial and error as a learning method is not acceptable in high risk technologies. We must not only get things right first time, but adapt the management of safety to the dynamic of constant change. This book explores that dilemma by studying how organisations manage safety and what is crucial for a good safety management system, how to harness change directly to safety improvement and how to adapt safety management systems to change imposed from the outside.

This is a multi-authored volume addressing the topical subjects of event analysis and the learning organisation within the context of safety management systems.

When an accident occurs, we respond in a number of ways: we look for someone to blame, we try to understand why it happened, we seek to learn and take precautions for the future and we may breathe a sigh of relief and try to forget the accident as quickly as possible.
This book is about how to manage these various responses to an accident. It addresses the question of how to manage the stages of learning from disasters and other accidents and of:
- how data could be collected and analysed to derive the lessons
- how and how far the different and conflicting objectives of judicial procedures and organisational learning could be reconciled.

In the past decade, the issue of organisational shortcomings has emerged as a central focus, but there have been few, if any, proven techniques or management systems for coping with such issues. We are still discovering how to ensure organisations learn and change when faced with accidents. At a wider level we need to address how society learns, how to regulate industry, how to co-ordinate the activities of the many various people responsible for safety within given contexts (eg within transport networks). We must take necessary action, but avoid knee-jerk, expensive and ineffective reactions fuelled by the heat of emotions.

Safety regulation is society's way of keeping the genie of technology in the bottle, whilst still exploiting its power for creating wealth and change. It is a difficult compromise to make. Regulators often have a thankless task. If all seems to go well they are painted as too repressive and anti-technological; if disaster strikes, the searchlight of media attention increasingly focuses on them, looking for lax enforcement, blind eyes being turned and cosy relations with the regulated. This title explores the dilemmas of the regulator through case studies presented by the regulators themselves and through research-based analyses from different disciplines of the workings of the regulators and the regulatory system. More importantly it surveys the tools available to resolve the dilemmas and asks what we know about their successes and shortcomings and what can be learned over the boundaries of industries and technologies about the principles of successful safety regulation. Chapters are written by authors from seven countries, with an international perspective. They examine the role of certification, safety cases, strictly enforced detailed rules, professional regulation and self-regulation. The text covers new risks such as those from medical devices and biotechnology, as well as the well-known fields of nuclear power, chemical plants, mining, oil and gas production, railways and the traditionally difficult area of small companies.