Regulatory inspection and the changing legitimacy of health and safety

The regulation of conduct via law is a key mechanism through which broader social meanings are negotiated and expressed. The use of regulatory tools to bring about desired outcomes reflects existing social and political understandings about¬ institutional legitimacy, the meanings attached to regulation, and the values it seeks to advance. But these contextual understandings are not static, and their evolution poses challenges for regulators, particularly when they reflect political framing processes. This paper shows how inspection has been reshaped as a tool within the United Kingdom’s health and safety system by changes in the meanings attached to the concept of ‘risk-based regulation’. While rates of inspection have fallen dramatically in recent years, the nature and quality of inspection have also been fundamentally reshaped via an increasingly procedural and economically-rational ‘risk-based’ policy context. This has had consequences for the transformative and symbolic value of inspection as a tool of regulatory practice

What motivates employers to establish preventive arrangements? An examination of the case of supply chains

This paper examines existing evidence as to the factors that prompt organisations to utilise supply chains to influence how health and safety is managed within them, with a view to shedding light on how far it serves to confirm or challenge the view that in general employers are unlikely to voluntarily pursue preventive management initiatives in the absence of external regulatory pressures. The analysis reveals a range of initiatives undertaken to utilise supply chains to support improvements in health and safety management, both at the level of individual organisations and via trade and industry bodies. It also, however, indicates that while supply chains can be used to improve how health and safety is managed within them, only in relatively narrowly defined circumstances will market-based business motivations alone serve to encourage the utilisation of this potential. It is further concluded that if policy-makers wish to see supply chains used more widely to improve standards of health and safety standards, then they need to do more than merely encourage voluntary action in this regard

Workplace injury and voice: a comparison of management and union perceptions

This article moves beyond the existing institutional focus on union representation and workplace injury by looking at the substance of union representation and participation in the management of occupational health and safety (OHS). The effects on workplace injuries of different configurations of OHS voice (negotiation, consultation, information or ‘none’), as mapped by the perceptions of both management and unions in the same workplace, are explored using the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004. The findings indicate that some participation is better than none, that more inclusive voice configurations are better than those that are less inclusive and that the alignment of voice between management and unions is fundamental to success. The impact of less inclusive participation is also found to be conditioned by the extent of trade union membership in the workplace