(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.