(Mis)understanding Safety Culture and Its Relationship to Safety Management

Although the concept of safety culture was coined in relation to major accidents like Chernobyl and Piper Alpha, it has been embraced by the safety community at large as a cause for unsafe practice. In this article, three approaches to safety culture are discussed in terms of their underlying concepts of culture and organizational culture. Culture is an intangible, fuzzy concept encompassing acquired assumptions that is shared among the members of a group and that provides meaning to their perceptions and actions and those of others. The basic assumptions that form the essence of a culture are shared, yet tacit, convictions, which manifest themselves subtly in the visible world. As applied by safety researchers, the culture concept is deprived of much of its depth and subtlety, and is morphed into a grab bag of behavioral and other visible characteristics, without reference to the meaning these characteristics might actually have, and often infused with normative overtones. By combining the three approaches, we can resurrect the notion of safety culture and strengthen its analytical potential in understanding the development and implementation of safety management systems.     

Selective Guide to Current Reference Sources on Marriage,Obesity, and Dieting

No abstract available for this article.     

Manufacturing management strategies for environmental protection: Toward the environmental upgrading of management and manufacturing systems to cope with environmental laws

Recent environmental problems have been caused by business activities and a lifestyle based on mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal. These problems have also become global in scale. Increasingly, global efforts are being applied to preserve and improve the environment. NEC, a worldwide electronics manufacturer, created its own environment action plan called Eco-Action 21. This is a continuously evolving plan applied throughout the NEC group and subsidiaries. Globally, 34 NEC manufacturing sites have received ISO 14001 certification. NEC Tohoku in Japan and NEC Ireland obtained BS 7750 certification even before this. NEC improves subcontractors' environmental behaviour with our accumulated expertize and technology derived from our ISO experience and our own development. Input for this paper was not only from NEC Tohoku and the NEC group, but also from outside NEC.     

Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizational culture

In spite of the importance of organizational culture, scholarly advances in our understanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of culture research and argue that the ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how to study it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring culture. This ambiguity has constrained progress in both developing a coherent theory of organizational culture and accreting replicable and valid findings. To make progress we argue that future research should focus on conceptualizing and assessing organizational culture as the norms that characterize a group or organization that if widely shared and strongly held, act as a social control system to shape members’ attitudes and behaviors. We further argue that to accomplish this, researchers need to recognize that norms can be parsed into three distinct dimensions: (1) the content or what is deemed important (e.g., teamwork, accountability, innovation), (2) the consensus or how widely shared norms are held across people, and (3) the intensity of feelings about the importance of the norm (e.g., are people willing to sanction others). From this perspective we suggest how future research might be able to clarify some of the current conflicts and confusion that characterize the current state of the field.     

Genetic and environmental influences on cognition during childhood

The basic methodology of behavior genetics is described in the context of the twin and sibling/adoption design. Results of applying this model to cross-sectional data on cognitive development throughout the lifespan are presented. Results from a large longitudinal twin and adoption study of general intelligence are presented to illustrate the use of the basic behavior genetic model in studying the causes of continuity and change in development. A special model is presented for the study of abnormal behavior occurring at the extremes of the distribution and an adaptation of the model is discussed for the study of genetic linkage or the mapping of quantitative trait loci (QTL). Results of applying this model to a sample of twins and kindred siblings indicated the presence of a major QTL for dyslexia on chromosome 6. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate the scope of behavior genetic methodology in studying individual differences in behavior in a biosocial context.     

论我国推广股票期权制度的困难及其克服

股票期权作为一种对企业家的激励机制在我国还是一种新生事物,这种“舶来的洋货”对我国这种社会主义的发展中国家还有许多不适应,在实际的运行过程中也遇到了许多的困难和障碍.本文从分析这些困难和障碍入手,提出优化和完善法制环境、股票市场和企业家人才市场是我国成功地推广股票期权制度必不可少的前提条件.     

企业并购过程中的组织认同行为

近年来,企业并购已经成为逐渐被人们所熟悉的一个词语。但是,很多企业在并购的过程中出现了大量的不适应性问题,甚至有的并购行为最终走向了失败。在并购发生前、发生过程中以及发生后员工的组织认同都受到并购行为的影响而发生变化。在并购发生后,组织认同的重新构建就成了决定并购成败的重要因素。     

Human and organizational factors in offshore safety

The role of human and organizational factors in predicting accidents and incidents has become of major interest to the UK offshore oil and gas industry. Some of these factors had been measured in an earlier study focusing on the role of risk perception in determining accident involvement. The current study sought to extend the methodology by focusing on perceptions of organizational factors that could have an impact on safety. A self-report questionnaire was developed and distributed to 11 installations operating on the UK Continental Shelf. A total of 722 were returned (33% response rate) from a representative sample of the offshore workforce on these installations. The study investigated the underlying structure and content of offshore employees' attitudes to safety, feelings of safety and satisfaction with safety measures. Correlations and step-wise regression analysis were used to test the relationships between measures. The results suggest that 'unsafe' behaviour is the 'best' predictor of accidents/near misses as measured by self-report data and that unsafe behaviour is, in turn, driven by perceptions of pressure for production.     

构建我省环境法律体系，保障环境立省战略实施

环境立省的前提是以优良的环境为基础，而优良环境的创造需要相应的法律保障。审视我省现有环境法规、规章，还难于适应我省环境立省发展战略需要，因而，重新梳理、修订相关法规、规章，以构建严密、协调的环境法律体系即成为我省实施环境立省战略的重要任务。     

我国企业开展电子商务的障碍分析

本文运用辨证唯物主义的观点对我国企业开展电子商务的障碍从内因和外因两个方面进行阐述 ,作为电子商务主体的企业 ,其内在动因不足才是我国企业电子商务发展缓慢的根本原因所在 ,即内部障碍 ,主要表现为组织结构转型的困难及企业目标与个人目标的冲突等方面 ;企业的外部环境因素如安全认证 ,支付系统等的缺乏和不完善又构成企业电子商务发展的外部障碍