Assessment of an emerging concept in system safety : "the just culture"

Accidents and incidents are among the major drawbacks in the development of systems engineering. Investigations attribute most of these accidents to their operators' unsafe acts generally termed as "human errors". One way most organizations chose to address this issue is to define accountability and assign blame in the wake of accidents. Clearly, disciplinary policies in force in organizations are supposed to support their system safety efforts. Yet, despite the prevalence of the culture of blame, the percentage of accidents attributed to human errors is not decreasing significantly. Recently, some researchers in system safety rightly identified the overemphasis on blame as a major impediment to conducting proper accident investigations and setting an effective reporting safety system. So, they developed an alternative concept that they termed "Just Culture" that is supposed to improve safety in organizations by addressing the limitations of the current punitive culture.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Soro, Adama

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nancy Leveson.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/59273

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/59273