Strategy, culture and safety

•Economic deregulation has modified the culture of nuclear power plants.•Our model aims to understand the cultural construction of organizational life.•Cultural maps are the representation of cultural content, consensus and coherence.•The cultural configurations of nuclear plants comprise a number of cultural islands.•The analysis of the link between strategy, culture and nuclear safety is essential.

This article summarizes the research conducted into the emerging concern of the cultural transformation of nuclear power plants as a result of the economic deregulation of the electricity markets which began in most Western countries in the 90s. An alternative theoretical framework is proposed, the cultural organization model, which enables cultural analysis to be performed from the twofold dimension of competitiveness and safety. The empirical application of this model to analyze the cultural configurations of four Spanish nuclear power plants provides a hitherto inexistent baseline of cultural research, centered on revealing the companies' commitment to identifying problems and their capability for collective learning, two basic processes for understanding the social construction of nuclear safety.