UNLOCKING THE ORGANIZATION: ACTION RESEARCH AS A MEANS OF IMPROVING ORGANIZATIONAL SAFETY

Most companies involved in hazardous operations are required to have some sort of safety management system. The most frequently used approaches to safety management are largely bureaucratic ones, which rely heavily on top-down perspectives on organizations, and on extensive systems of rules and regulations. We argue that these approaches can lead organizations into lock-in situations, where they get "stuck" in certain ways of thinking and acting with regard to safety. We show how a holistic cultural approach based on principles of action research can contribute to the unlocking of organizations. By serving as a medium for bottom-up information and stimulating the safety managers to see alternative ways of managing safety, action research is a highly suitable means for achieving a more interactive relationship between the organisation's safety legislators and its employees. Such an interactive relationship must be considered an important prerequisite of Reason's (1997) concept of an informed culture, which in many ways constitutes the ideal of all safety management systems. The argument is based on empirical work carried out in a Norwegian oil company over a period of five years.