Theories of (safety) culture revisited—An anthropological approach

Despite a great interest in the concept of “safety culture”, there is little common understanding of the concept. Anthropologists disagree with management consultants, organization theorists and psychologists on important issues. In particular, much of the “management literature” seems to have a more instrumental treatment of the concept. There are several ways of understanding culture – from the linguistic level with a focus on discourse and conflicts, to a “taken for granted” level where “tacit knowledge” is the key phrase, whereas culture as “webs of significance” can be understood from an epistemological position, in short, how we grasp the world. In addition, different cultural perspectives like integration, differentiation and ambiguity are important in cultural analyzes, but whether one is dealing with a single unitary culture, many subcultures, or no culture at all, is not a theoretical question but an empirical one, as will be demonstrated using oil drilling as a case. One implication of this is that researchers should be more sensitive to different cultural levels/perspectives and methodological triangulation in their cultural analyses – and managers should be a little more modest in their efforts to manage cultures.