Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal

Safety Culture, Corporate Culture: Organizational Transformation and the Commitment to Safety
Heather Höpfl
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Heather Höpfl, (1994),"Safety Culture, Corporate Culture", Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal,
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 Safety Culture,
Safety Culture, Corporate Corporate
Culture Culture

Organizational Transformation and the

49
Commitment to Safety
Heather Höpfl
Bolton Business School, Bolton Institute, UK

Introduction
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The past decade-and-a-half has been a period of considerable and rapid change.
It has been a period in which many organizations have decided to address the
need for change via the transformation of organizational culture. What this
means in practice is problematic. This article examines the implications of
organizational culture change for the ways in which safety issues are perceived,
formulated and addressed.
The last ten years has seen a proliferation of literature on the subject of
organizational culture. Much of the writing within the management perspective
has regarded organizational culture as a variable to be manipulated (see
Smircich’s critical paper[1] and managed to strategic ends[2-7] This view of
organizational culture as a variable carries with it the implication that culture
can be controlled, that beliefs and values can be moulded and that behaviour
can be changed in order to be perceived more favourably by customers. Hence,
culture change has been viewed as a means of improving corporate
performance by securing greater employee commitment and identification with
corporate values. According to Willmott[8], theorists have either regarded
culture in this way, as a critical variable to be manipulated to improve
performance, or as a “root metaphor” to describe and explain social phenomena
in organizations.

Organizational Culture
Generally speaking, there has been an absence of critical analysis in the
management literature. Schein’s cultural model is a case in point. This has been
particularly influential in offering both a definition of culture and suggestions
for a diagnostic approach to the study of organizational culture[9,10]. Schein
defines culture as the “basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by
members of an organization”[10, p. 8], a definition which in various

The author acknowledges the contribution of Moira Jennings, Research Assistant, School of
Civil Engineering, Bolton Institute, for her help with formatting the article and chasing incom-
plete references. Disaster Prevention and
Management, Vol. 3 No. 3, 1994,
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Second International Conference on pp. 49-58. © MCB University Press,
Emergency Planning and Disaster Management, Lancaster (UK), July 11-14, 1993. 0965-3562
 Disaster formulations appears in innumerable accounts and studies of organizational
Prevention and culture. Bate[11] argues that a “key feature of culture is that it is shared – it
Management refers to ideas, meanings and values people hold in common”. Sathe[6, p. 11])
contends that, “People feel a sense of commitment to an organization’s
3,3 objectives when they identify with those objectives and experience some
emotional attachment to them. The shared beliefs and values that compose
50 culture help generate such identification and attachment”. The notion of shared
beliefs and values is regarded as unproblematic. This article seeks to examine
the implications of the assumption of shared meaning for safety and to give
attention to the related problem of “the management of meaning”[1,12].
Whether regarded as a root metaphor, a functional variable or as an instrument
of increased management control, the study of culture and corporate values
clearly has important implications for the study of safety.
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In order to examine these implications it is necessary to provide evidence of

the instability of the theoretical notion of cultural consensus and the simplistic
assumption of culture as a manageable variable. Linstead and Grafton
Small[13] argue that corporate culture is “the term used for a culture devised by
management and transmitted, marketed, sold or imposed on the rest of the
organisation”, that it has an internal and external image and that it “includes
actions and belief – the rites, rituals, stories, values which are offered to
organizational members as part of the seductive process of achieving
membership and gaining commitment”. This definition of corporate culture
provides a valuable starting point because it is rooted in managerial
assumptions regarding entitlement to manipulate the social aspects of work or
as Willmott[8] puts it, “by enabling employees to derive a sense of meaning and
purpose from using their discretion to put corporate values into practice ... non-
rational aspects of organization ... can be colonised by management”. This latter
point has considerable implications for safety and for the way in which non-
rational or irrational aspects of systems come to be regarded. If in the pursuit of
corporate consensus, organizations seek to “colonize” the non-rational,
corporate culture functions to conceal discrepancies and to gloss over the
dysfunctional.
Where culture is regarded as capable of manipulation, commitment to the
organization is assumed to be increased as the individual’s sense of identity is
brought into line with the values of the corporate culture. This in turn produces
a standardized pattern of behaviours which characterize the company and
which, in effect, become the basis of a corporate performance. As organizations
become increasingly concerned with regularly pursued patterns of behaviour to
support a notion of “service” and “quality”, the performance aspect of corporate
culture becomes increasingly problematic. An extreme example of this is
provided by Disneyland in Van Maanen[14, p. 58-76]. The Disneyland site is
divided into three areas “back-stage”, “on-stage” and “staging”, behaviour may
differ considerably between the different arenas of action. Moreover, and with
direct relevance to safety, within the performance of the role, Van Maanen[14,
pp. 71-2] identifies a range of strategies adopted by ride operators to punish
 “guests” who fail to play out their roles according to the script. Members of the Safety Culture,
public who “fail to play their part” are dealt with by a whole range of illicit Corporate
behaviours which are concealed by the smiling courtesy of Disneyland role Culture
performance. These include guests being “accidentally” hit in the face by seat
belts, violent braking causing guests to fly forward from their seats, being
drenched, and having their hands trapped. Disneyland is a well regulated
corporate culture with comprehensive manuals to govern behaviour and 51
interaction. The strength of the corporate culture is matched by the strength of
resistance to it and the complex web of informal ways of deviating from the
manual. There are direct parallels to this in safety management. Rigorous and
bureaucratic approaches to safety may produce high standards of performance
in terms of that which is presented and measurable or observable. The day-to-
day practice may be completely different, that is, attention may be paid to
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producing the appearance while, or even at the expense of, neglecting day-to-
day practice.
Caesar, in a controversial paper presented to the Flight Safety Foundation Air
Safety Seminar in Los Angeles 1992[15], commented that “the passenger
crawling away from the wreckage of a burnt-out aircraft is unlikely to comment
on the quality of the caviar or the temperature of the wine”. This provocative
statement exposes a complex set of issues which arise from the articulation
between corporate culture as performance and the safety issues which can be
obscured by appearances. Clearly, an understanding of the wider implications
of corporate culture change requires a critical awareness of corporate culture as
a privileged or “official” standpoint and an appreciation of the need to give
attention to what is concealed by its construction.

Corporate Culture Change and Safety Management

As well as being a period of rapid organizational change, the past decade has
been characterized by a series of major disasters affecting such diverse
technologies as nuclear installations, chemical plants, oil tankers and ferries,
railway networks, oil platforms and, of course, commercial and military aircraft.
Despite the obvious differences in the industries involved and their technologies,
it has become apparent from the analysis of such disasters that, at a contextual
level, there are many common characteristics[16]. As a result, considerable
attention has been paid to the complexity of the contributory causes in accident
analysis, to the multiplicity of ways in which systems can fail, to the
predominance of human factor contributions to failure, to perceptual and
information difficulties and, not least, to the appreciation of the historical
dimension, the fact that disasters often have a long incubation period. This
widening of the boundary around safety issues has resulted in a move away from
what Toft has described as a “propensity to look for simple causal
solutions…shaped by the technical concerns of the engineering community”[17]
towards a commitment to the recognition of the social and organizational
context of incidents and accidents. In this article, the concern is to examine the
extent to which the manipulation of corporate culture reduces safety issues to a
 Disaster declared rhetoric supported by artifacts of a “safety culture” which may, in turn,
Prevention and reduce a concern for safety to a cosmetic exercise. In such circumstances, the
Management problem of safety becomes a matter of having “appropriate” methods, manuals
and messages. Safety becomes critical to the extent that what is unsafe is
3,3 concealed by the pursuit of coherent rhetoric and the apparent security of
quantification.
52 A number of theorists have wrestled with these aspects of safety. Reason,
among others, points to the significance of the “latent failures”[16, p. 28] which
only become evident when they occur with a “precipitating event”[18] which
causes the system to fail. Moreover, Reason contends that “there is a growing
awareness ... that attempts to discover and remedy these latent failures will
achieve greater safety benefits than will localized efforts to minimize active
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failures”[16, p. 476-7], for example, in the nuclear industry, failure to perform

necessary maintenance activities, i.e. latent failure, has played a major role in
incidents and accidents in nuclear installations[19].
Consequently, Reason argues that safety specialists need to direct their
attention to the identification and neutralization of latent failures, rather than
attempting to prevent “active” or front line failures. Yet, it is generally to the
identifiable aspects of safety that most attention is paid. In the face of major
accidents and disasters, many organizations have become concerned to
demonstrate a visible commitment to safety. Unfortunately, this may lead to a
well intentioned commitment to the visible aspects of safety at the cost of what
is not immediate and apparent.
In his now classic study of disasters, Turner[18] argued that large-scale
accidents have an “incubation period” in which there are a series of unnoticed
events which are likely to run counter to established beliefs about the way that
the system operates or that risks are defined. Turner encouraged safety
researchers to concern themselves with “the cultural disruption which is
produced when anticipated patterns of information fail to materialize” in order
to develop an appreciation of the way in which individuals “gradually come to
develop and rely on a mistaken view of the world”[18, p. 193]. “The problem of
understanding the origins of disaster is the problem of understanding and
accounting for harmful discharges of energy which occur in ways
unanticipated by those pursuing orderly goals”[18, p. 201].
The organic culture of the workplace produces its own taken-for-granted
assumptions about the world and systems of ordering experience. The dangers
are well documented in accident literature. However, organizational culture
change provides a further level of complexity. Corporate culture with its
emphasis on shared beliefs, values, norms and style seeks to construct common
meanings for experience. The mechanisms of corporate culture change
reinforce a common rhetoric by ensuring the coherence of systems, structures,
skills and rewards as a basis for regulating and standardizing patterns of
behaviour. This coherent and orderly world increasingly comes to believe in its
own constructions[20, 21]. This becomes part of the problem, that is, the orderly
 world believes its own messages regarding the efficacy of its safety structures Safety Culture,
and procedures. Corporate
For Turner, this period of order ends when some precipitating event draws Culture
attention to the discrepancy between the environment as it is believed to be and
the environment as it actually is. This forces into the open the “hidden,
ambiguous or anomalous events which have accumulated during the
incubation period”[18, p. 201] producing a sudden shift in information levels. By 53
seeking to create and manage meaning for employees, organizations aim to
produce a uniformity of standards, service and quality. There are two problems
with this.
First, the pursuit of coherence imposes the appearance of order on a wide
range of behaviours and experiences including the discrepant and irrational.
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Thus, multiple meanings are likely to be glossed over by a privileged

interpretation of events. The apparently purposive nature of organizations
supports the validity of this interpretation and provides rewards for consensus.
The power to manage meanings is intrinsic to this process of order and giving
orders as is the framing of corporate values. However, the rewards a company
can offer, while they undoubtedly attach meaning to behaviour and experience,
are in themselves insufficient to sustain meaning. Contradictions are concealed
by appearance, that is to say, members of organizations play the roles that are
required of them with varying degrees of skill while personal attitudes and
values may be temporarily eclipsed by such performances.
Organizations seek to create and re-create themselves to achieve a
presentation and re-presentation of that appearance. The meaning which is
offered as part of the corporate definition of reality, located as it is in an
instrumental approach to the present, is inherently conflictual but seductive.
These conflicts are not normally exposed until some dislocation of expectation
occurs. The individual in the organization is required to play a role in a specific
context or range of contexts. As such, he/she does not require “cultural
consensus”[22, p. 58] about the meanings on which their actions are based.
What this means is that consensus regarding the frame of action, the
performance, becomes more important than shared meanings about the nature
of the action. A smooth reading through the “script” becomes more important
than interpretative improvisation. In safety terms, it leads to situations where
an airline stewardess will tell a passenger, “I’m sure the captain knows what
he’s doing” when the passenger provides information which is contrary to the
script. Clearly, this is always true of the norms of any social situation. The point
here is that corporate culture change seeks to reinforce corporate norms and in
doing so may foreclose on some of the wider interpretations of an event with
detrimental consequences for safety.
A second problem area concerns the imposition of apparently consensual
values. This will result in dissonant behaviour and experience in organizational
members who may demonstrate their resistance to the organization in a range
of unpredictable ways, for example, as in the Disneyland case[14] or that of
airline cabin crew, who in recent years have undergone intensive “customer
 Disaster service” training programmes, and have developed a range of behavioural
Prevention and strategies to resist the roles that have been laid on them. Whether from a
theoretical standpoint or as the basis of managerial action, what needs to be
Management challenged is the “naïve preoccupation with shared values as a route to
3,3 organizational success”[13, p. 332].
Corporate culture has been viewed as an organizational variable to be
54 manipulated in order to:
● increase commitment;
● achieve standardized patterns of behaviours and style;
● pursue “quality” and “service”;
● improve performance;
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● change customer/competitor perceptions; and

● increase identification with the organization.
However, in relation to safety, the following factors may implicitly apply to
corporate culture:
● Corporate culture seeks to order the non-rational aspects of behaviour.
● Behavioural regularity conceals dysfunctional aspects.
● Performance can equate with appearance.
● Local practice may be very different from espoused cultural values and
norms.
● Culture may even induce resistance, deviance.
● Culture may become the province of rehearsed rhetoric as opposed to
practice.
● Safety may become synonymous with safety artefacts – manuals, audits,
quantifications and procedures.
Multiple meanings, irrational aspects of systems and issues of information for
which there are no appropriate categories are important issues to be borne in
mind. Sometimes it is the case that there is no appropriate channel for the
specific or discrepant piece of information to enter the system either because the
particular problem is not officially recognized as a hazard or because the existing
construction of the situation does not permit the new information to disconcert
perceptions. By reinforcing a particular style of desired behaviour, organizations
exacerbate this problem so that an organization may confine itself to specific
ways of perceiving its task, to “bounded decision zones”[18, p.200]. The problem
for safety management is that it is what is left outside of this “bounded
rationality” which is likely to be far more hazardous than those aspects of the
system which have been anticipated.

Safety Culture Development

There is a problem in the relationship between the concept of an organizational
culture and that of a safety culture. A safety culture cannot be set aside from the
 Safety Culture,
Safety rhetoric and vulnerability Corporate
Development of safety rhetoric Culture
↓
Consensual world view of safety practice
↓
Exclusion of the non-rational
55
↓
Glossing of discrepant information
↓
Pursuit of "cosmetic" appearance of safety
↓
Partial control of information =
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Delusion of control of behaviour/nature

↓
Power to construct alternative perspectives as deviant Figure 1.
↓ Safety Culture
Paradox of vulnerability Development; Safety
Rhetoric and
Vulnerability

organizational context in which it resides. A safety culture implies some level of

relationship between the corporate culture of an organization and the culture of
the workplace. There are many reasons why these two cultures differ. The
intention here is not to discredit the notion of a safety culture but, rather, to put
forward the notion of a safety culture as an interpretative device which mediates
between the espoused values of the corporate culture, that is its declared and
desired common values, and the taken-for-granted assumptions of the workplace
culture (see Figure 1). A safety culture is not merely a set of assumptions, shared
values, behavioural routines and supporting documentation. A safety culture
must be capable of mediating between “best practice”, norms of conduct and
good order and, at the same time, create an environment which is receptive to
multiple sources of information, one which protects itself from its own delusions
and which problematizes learning.

Behind the Assumptions of Safety Management

Recent work by Turner[23] has focused on ways in which organizational
learning can be used in safety management and has drawn attention to the
importance of getting behind appearances in order to gain access to
organizational processes. In this respect, he argues that new organizational
learning requires an appreciation of the processes and multiple perceptions of
which organizations are made up; that organizations are like mysteries which
have to be unravelled; that the learning cycle is complicated by ambiguities,
corruptions of meaning, multiple meanings, symbols and so on; that the
assumption of rationality needs to be bracketed: that records and computerized
systems need to be regarded as problematic; that assumptions of completeness
 Disaster need to be challenged; that interpretative methods need to be used to get behind
Prevention and taken for granted assumptions.
Management This approach to safety inevitably meets resistance. In part, this is because it
represents a philosophical commitment to a style of safety management which
3,3 cannot be quantified nor directly applied at an operational level. The issues
which it seeks to keep in play do not yield to analysis or lend themselves to data
56 capture. Safety is viewed as something which cannot be reduced to simple
formulations or quantifications. The need to present safety management as an
entirely rational activity precludes an appreciation of the irrational aspects of
safety which theorists such as Toft[17], Turner[18,23] and Waring[24] have
done so much to advance.
However, some organizations have given attention to the importance of an
interpretative environment for safety. Safety services in British Airways
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provides a notable example of a philosophical approach to safety which has

involved a commitment to the principles of organizational learning. The
department seeks to stimulate reciprocity between information which is
comparatively straightforward to acquire and that which is not[25]. This
implies developing a sensitivity and responsiveness within the system to the
complex, irrational, embedded, conflictual aspects of information which may be
permitted to emerge by a commitment to organizational learning and the
acquisition of a dynamic memory.

Summary
This article has sought to give attention to the relationship between corporate
culture and safety culture. The purpose has been to regard the relationship as
problematic and to consider the implications for the way in which safety issues
are addressed.
In essence, the article contrasts corporate culture which seeks to promote
shared values, norms, styles and regularity pursued patterns of behaviour with
safety cultures which need to get behind appearances, taken-for-granted
assumptions and norms in order to remain receptive to the irrational aspects of
systems. Where corporate cultures appropriate safety as a strategic variable
without attention to these underlying issues, the result can at best be cosmetic.

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Further Reading
Ackroyd, S. and Crowdy, P., “Can Culture Be Managed? Working with “Raw” Material: The Case
of the English Slaughtermen”, Personnel Review, Vol. 19 No. 5, 1989, pp. 3-13.
Anthony, P.D., “The Paradox of the Management of Culture or ‘He Who Leads is Lost’”, Personnel
Review, Vol. 19 No. 4, 1989, pp. 3-8.
Bruce, M., “Managing People First – Bringing the Service Concept into British Airways”,
Industrial and Commercial Training, March/April 1987.
 Disaster Caesar, H., “Air Transport Development and the Role of Aviation Administration”, Proceedings of
the 43rd International Air Safety Seminar (IASS), Rome, 1990.
Prevention and Christensen, S. and Kreiner, K., “On the Origin of Organizational Cultures”, a paper presented to
Management the SCOS Conference, Lund, June 1984.
3,3 Holtom, M., “The Basis for Safety Management”, Focus, November 1991.
Johnson, G., Strategic Change and the Management Process, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987.
Kirkbride P.S., “Personnel Management and Organizational Culture: A Case of Deviant
58 Innovation?”, Personnel Review, Vol. 16 No. 1, 1987, pp. 3-9.
Martin, J. and Meyerson, D., “Organizational Cultures and the Denial, Channelling and
Acknowledgement of Ambiguity”, in Pondy, L.R., Boland, R.J. and Thomas, H. (Eds),
Managing Ambiguity and Change, Wiley, 1988.
Pascale, R., “The Paradox of ‘Corporate Culture’: Reconciling Ourselves to Socialization”,
California Management Review, Vol. XXVII No. 2, 1985, pp. 26-41.
Ray, C.A., “Corporate Culture: The Last Frontier of Control”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol.
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23 No. 3, 1986, pp. 287-97.

Reason, J., “The Chernobyl Errors”, Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, Vol. 40, 1987,
pp. 201-6.
Seaman, C., “The British Airways Safety Information System”, a presentation to the 44th IASS,
Singapore, November 1991.
Smircich, L., “Concepts of Culture and Organizational Analysis”, Administrative Science
Quarterly, Vol. 28, 1983, pp. 339-58.
Thomas, M., “In Search of Culture: Holy Grail or Gravy Train?”, Personnel Management,
September 1985.
Toft, B. and Turner, B.A., “The Schematic Report Analysis Diagram: A Simple Aid to Learning
From Large-scale Failures”, International CIS Journal: Command and Control, Communication
and Information Systems, Vol. l No. 2, April/May 1987.
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