Frontline safety: understanding the workplace as a site of regulatory engagement

The concept of frontline safety encapsulates an approach to occupational health and safety that emphasizes the 'other side of the regulatory relationship' – the ways in which safety culture, individual responsibility, organizational citizenship, trust, and compliance are interpreted and experienced at the local level. By exploring theoretical tensions over the most appropriate way of conceptualizing and framing frontline regulatory engagement, we can better identify the ways in which conceptions of individuals (as rational, responsible, economic actors) are constructed and maintained through workplace interactions and decision-making, as part of the fulfilment of the ideological and constitutive needs of neoliberal labor markets

Determining factors driving sustainable performance through the application of lean management practices in horticultural primary production

Erasmus Mundus Inspire Projec

Internalised Values and Fairness Perception: Ethics in Knowledge Management

This chapter argues for ethical consideration in knowledge management (KM). It explores the effect that internalised values and fairness perception have on individuals’ participation in KM practices. Knowledge is power, and organisations seek to manage knowledge through KM practices. For knowledge to be processed, individual employees—the source of all knowledge—need to be willing to participate in KM practices. As knowledge is power and a key constituent part of knowledge is ethics, individuals’ internalised values and fairness perception affect knowledge-processing. Where an organisation claims ownership over knowledge, an individual may perceive being treated unfairly, which may obstruct knowledge-processing. Through adopting ethical KM practices, individual needs are respected, enabling knowledge-processing. Implications point towards an ethical agenda in KM theory and practice

If human errors are assumed as crimes in a safety culture: A lifeworld analysis of a rail crash

This study reanalyses the commuter train incident that involved the West Japan Railway Company (JR West). The incident, which occurred on 25 April 2005, claimed 107 lives (passengers and the train driver) and injured 562 passengers. The delay in using the brake and the train driver’s inattention generated confusion and serious errors. The train driver’s inattentiveness may be attributed to his grave concern over reporting personal mistakes to company authorities as it is mandatory for erring JR West crew members to go through ‘learning practices’. The phenomenological analyses showed how the unintended consequences of such learning practices played a key role in the train incident. This study also draws on Foucault’s concepts on discipline to analyse the learning practices in JR West, and employs the concept of collective myopia to account for the reasoning of JR West managers. </jats:p