RESUMO

Safety management is now entering an era quite different to that which marked its foundation. The multiple challenges facing safety engineering are focused upon. In the United States, France, Britain, and Brazil, safety engineering has experienced fast growth over the past two decades. An increased questioning of the traditional assumptions of the profession in both traditional and postindustrial work has accompanied this growth. New directions of reflection and research are being pursued. Recent research in sociology, where worker perceptions of tasks and their dangers are incorporated into the analysis of accident production, brings promising but still incipient new perspectives to accident research and theory. Simultaneously, novel challenges for safety engineering are posed by the emergence of postindustrial technologies. Some of these threaten large civilian populations, and the knowledge is not currently available to guarantee accident prevention. In this way the responsibilities of safety engineering, both ethical and with regards the provision of information to the public, are brought under the spotlight. The face of safety engineering is being changed.

Assuntos

Ergonomia , Saúde Ocupacional , Segurança , Prevenção de Acidentes , Brasil , Previsões , França , Humanos , Psicologia Industrial/tendências , Pesquisa/tendências , Sociologia Médica/tendências , Reino Unido , Estados Unidos

RESUMO

The birth of industrial society produced demand for the services of professionals specialized in matters related to industrial safety. Three professions--safety engineering, industrial medicine, and ergonomics--are examined. These professions are observed to either submit to single sets of demands, to integrate contradictory demands, or to experience scission. Until the late 1960s their growth appears to have been relatively peaceful and uncontroversial. From this period onward, controversy breaks out over questions related to industrial safety, and professions and government administrations grow. Increasingly, the traditional approach of safety professionals is called into question, and they adopt new orientations. These changes are mapped through the examination of data drawn principally from the United States, France, Great Britain, and to a lesser extent Brazil. The traditional standards approach competes with cost-benefit analysis and with systemic safety for influence; in addition, an emergent approach that analyzes accident causes in terms of social relations of work is detected. From Bhopal to Chernobyl, new technologies subject civilian populations to risks of catastrophic accidents, and the action of safety professionals comes under the spotlight. The analysis constructed permits new understandings of the past and the future of these professions.

Assuntos

Ergonomia , Saúde Ocupacional , Medicina do Trabalho , Acidentes de Trabalho/prevenção & controle , Brasil , Análise Custo-Benefício , Segurança de Equipamentos , França , Humanos , Sindicatos , Medicina do Trabalho/tendências , Controle Social Formal , Reino Unido , Estados Unidos

RESUMO

Industrial accidents are produced by social relations work. This sociological explanation of accidents differs from the hypotheses on which the majority of modern safety practices are based, which reduce accident causes to unsafe acts and unsafe conditions. Accidents are seen as produced at each of three levels of social relations of work (rewards, command and organisation), and also non-socially at the individual-member level. The resulting hypotheses were tested using data collected according to a semi-experimental design in seven plants in which shift (day/night), shift type (rotating/fixed), technological type and management styles were the factors controlled for. Because of the design, machines, materials and, in most cases, workers were the same across shifts and social relations varied. The sociological theory proved capable of explaining most of the variation in inter-shift differences in accident rates, and, when tested statistically, appeared to have greater explanatory power than competing hypotheses. It is concluded that accidents can be prevented by workers who exercise auto-control at all levels and by management which, in the absence of worker orientations favourable to auto-control, engages in safety management as defined sociologically. A practical consequence for ergonomics is that when plant, equipment and processes are to be modified, an attempt to understand their interaction with the social relations of work should be made. A theoretical consequence is that sociological insights should be incorporated into the perspective of the ergonomics discipline.