Safety-II in Practice

Chapter 1Safety management anno 2016

Safety management has a brief but chequered history where the institutionalised concern for safety at places of work, in the sense of efforts to prevent harm to people, goes back about 200 years. The initial safety concerns focused on the harm and injuries that could befall people who were at work. This was understandable considering the nature of work, not least the nature of the relatively unsophisticated technology that was used. Seen from the perspective of industrial work in the second decade of the 21st century, the technology of the workplace in the 19th century was quite simple, not least because the level of automation was low. Work processes were also relatively independent of each other and would ...