HSE culture in the petroleum industry: Lost in translation?

•The paper addresses the industries’ response to regulation of HSE culture.•Translation is used as an analogy for organizational learning.•Translation is useful for analyzing and evaluating learning processes.

Encouraging a sound Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) culture is a regulatory requirement for petroleum companies operating on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Although regulators in different industries have increasingly included safety culture in their regulatory repertory, it is still rare that regulators explicitly require sound cultures. In this paper we study how the requirement is ‘translated’ in two different petroleum companies, discuss why the translations differ and the extent to which they represent good organizational learning about HSE. Translation is seen as a form of organizational learning. The analysis is based on institutional theory, and a virus metaphor for adoption of organizational ideas.The translations of §15 in the two companies differ considerably. There are also signs of translatory ‘mutation’ or drift from the original intentions behind the requirement. The different translations are explained by differences in histories, complexity and strategy between the companies.The study illustrates the applicability of the translation concept for analyzing organizational learning for safety and the usefulness of a virus metaphor for evaluating learning processes.