Random Noise

Measuring Your Company's Safety Performance

Georgina Poole, Sidney Dekker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032012438
• eBook ISBN: 9781040031049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

In the realm of safety management, this book embarks on a profound exploration of how the political economy was reshaped in the last two decades. Much like privatization, deregulation, and financialization altered the economic landscape, this narrative unveils how safety management has been affected by the intertwined dynamics of asset underinvestment, privatization, self-regulation, workplace flexibilization, and market-driven policies.

This book, the second installment of a thought-provoking trilogy on the consequences of neoliberalism, mirrors the political economy's promotion of the private sector's role in the economy. Just as neoliberalism amplified and accelerated the mechanisms of human-made disasters in complex systems, this narrative lays bare the heightened potential for safety misfortunes when governed by market-driven principles.

As the story unfolds, the book delves into the concept of 'synoptic legibility' in safety management, akin to how the political economy distilled its essence into privatization and deregulation. The authors scrutinize the consequences of translating safety measures into rigid targets, unveiling how this shift can distort the integrity of safety metrics and inadvertently harm individuals. Drawing parallels with historical blunders such as England's window tax, the book contemplates the precarious nature of equating simplified metrics with safety achievements. Much like the political economy's 'acceptable risk' renegotiations, it examines how the pursuit of safety through metrics and surveillance can lead to 'manufactured insecurity,' eroding trust, autonomy, and professionalism.

In Random Noise, Poole and Dekker extend this reach once again, writing for all managers, board members, organization leaders, consultants, practitioners, researchers, lecturers, students, and investigators curious to understand the genuine nature of organizational and safety performance.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The lure of a homogenised quantity
• 2 Stop counting what you can count – it doesn’t count
• 3 How many injuries are enough?
• 4 The absence of injuries does not predict what you think it does
• 5 But I am only injuring my sub-contractors!
• 6 Measuring nothing in ‘ultra-safe’ industries
• 7 Don’t talk about safety culture – talk about safety climate!
• 8 What if not every injury is preventable?
• 9 What should you measure instead?
• 10 Now what should your safety people do?
• References
• Index