There is safety in power, or power in safety

Abstract

Power and politics are profoundly implicated in organizational accidents. Yet the safety-scientific literature remains relatively uncommitted to a research agenda that would make power a critical category in our understanding of organizational safety. This has consequences for the field's scholarship and for safety praxis. This paper reviews how power in the literature has been elided or treated as an instrumental force where views of reality compete for acceptance and dominance. Despite its recent preoccupation with "safety culture," the literature has only just started embracing power as embodied in discourse or in the legitimated procedures and organizational processes for the production and acceptance of safety. We conclude with suggestions for how such a research agenda might look.