The way people think about safety influences how they carry out and structure their work; the safety paradigm one employs as a framework for understanding safety interacts reciprocally with ones activities and the work environment. Historically, however, the accepted way of thinking about safety has been a moving target. Rasmussen explains that the many social and management science areas (related to risk and safety management and human factors) have been evolving over the past several decades (1997). This is not surprising given the rapid transformation of technology and the nature and organisation of work itself (Hollnagel, 2005). Safety scientists have been discussing the different philosophical, scientific, and epistemological approaches to understanding safety with increasing frequency (for example: Amalberti, 2001; Dekker, 2005; Pariès, 1999; LeCoze, 2005; Leveson, 2002). In Erik Hollnagel’s work (2007, 2009) and recent lectures he describes two opposing views: the “traditional” perspective (also called Theory W) and the “systemic” perspective (Theory Z). We refer to the latter here as the “resilience” perspective.
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