The aim of this book is to show how a cultural approach can contribute to the assessment, description and improvement of safety conditions in organizations. The relationship between organizational culture and safety, epitomized through the concept of 'safety culture', has undoubtedly become one of the hottest topics of both safety research and practical efforts to improve safety. By combining a general framework and five research projects, the author explores and further develops the theoretical, methodological and practical basis of the study of safety culture. What are the theoretical foundations of a cultural approach to safety? How can the relationship between organizational culture and safety be empirically investigated? What are the links between organizational culture and safety in actual organizations? How can a cultural approach contribute to the improvement of safety? These are the key questions the book seeks to answer with a unified and in-depth account of the concept of safety culture.

This open access book gathers authors from a wide range of social-scientific and engineering disciplines to review challenges from their respective fields that arise from the processes of social and technological transformation taking place worldwide. The result is a much-needed collection of knowledge about the integration of social, organizational and technical challenges that need to be tackled to uphold safety in the digital age. The contributors whose work features in this book help their readers to navigate the massive increase in the capability to generate and use data in developing algorithms intended for automation of work, machine learning and next-generation artificial intelligence and the blockchain technology already in such extensive use in real-world organizations. This book deals with such issues as: · How can high-risk and safety-critical systems be affected by these developments, in terms of their activities, their organization, management and regulation? · What are the sociotechnical challenges of the proliferation of big data, algorithmic influence and cyber-security challenges in health care, transport, energy production/distribution and production of goods? Understanding the ways these systems operate in the rapidly changing digital context has become a core issue for academic researchers and other experts in safety science, security and critical-infrastructure protection. The research presented here offers a lens through which the reader can grasp the way such systems evolve and the implications for safety—an increasingly multidisciplinary challenge that this book does not shrink from addressing.

The aim of this book is to show how a cultural approach can contribute to the assessment, description and improvement of safety conditions in organizations. The relationship between organizational culture and safety, epitomized through the concept of 'safety culture', has undoubtedly become one of the hottest topics of both safety research and practical efforts to improve safety. By combining a general framework and five research projects, the author explores and further develops the theoretical, methodological and practical basis of the study of safety culture. What are the theoretical foundations of a cultural approach to safety? How can the relationship between organizational culture and safety be empirically investigated? What are the links between organizational culture and safety in actual organizations? How can a cultural approach contribute to the improvement of safety? These are the key questions the book seeks to answer with a unified and in-depth account of the concept of safety culture.