Key takeaways

Neoliberalism has contributed to an environment where regulation and rule making is done on a central per organisation basis that often is implemented by non-experts and gets in the way of frontline workers while providing (next to) no improvements for them in terms of safety and incident reduction. The path to safety management after neoliberalism is through “the restoration of professional judgement” and increased and encouraged participation and compensation of workers at the sharp end.

Detailed discussion

The paper starts with a short introduction into neoliberalism and the definition that is used throughout the paper based on

“Most scholars tend to agree that neoliberalism is broadly defined as the extension of competitive markets into all areas of life, including the economy, politics, and society” (Dekker, 2020, p. 1)

With that as a starting point an example is cited from studying impact in the mining industry and summarising a set of lived experiences of safety management in a neoliberal context:

• “Rules and regulations that have become overly obstructive;
• Safety systems that encourage a dumbing down of individuals and a dilution of personal autonomy and discretion;
• Higher stress levels due to a sense of loss of control;
• Considerable wasted effort;
• Systems that have become far too complicated;
• Common sense and initiative that have been discouraged;
• Cynicism about slogans, stated priorities and the motivation behind rules;
• Safety staff detached from the front line—either by their inappropriate experience or because of their physical location being remote from the workplace (cf. Woods, 2006).” (Dekker, 2020, p. 2)

With that it is also discussed that statistically a reduction in workplace fatalities hasn’t happened under this shift in safety management. And the safety management that is often encountered today is positioned as a “corollary of neoliberalism” following from the push to deregulation, encouraging organisations to make up their own centralised safety management with a focus on responsibilization of workers and a tap into a free market of “safety services” that are introducing outside auditing, researching, training, etc as well accreditation and consultancy.

From this assessing the current state of neo-liberal tainting of safety management as a non-working setup, the discussion is then switching its focus on the core question of what safety management could look like after neoliberalism.

The first focus area then is what is called “the restoration of professional judgement” in 4 areas:

1. The management of complex risks The first area here is related to the familiar idea of “sharp end professionals” having an immense amount of expertise that can and should be tapped into:

“Highly practiced professional skills of pattern recognition, scenario formulation and mental simulation of the execution of possible decision options (Klein, 1998) have shown to be far better at managing dynamic, complex situations than imposing fixed rules that supposedly reduce uncertainty.” (Dekker, 2020, p. 2)

2. Deregulation and reregulation Here it is pointed out that deregulation in spirit is fairly aligned with the idea of worker autonomy and authority needing to be positioned where expertise is located:

“Deregulation aligns, in spirit and in principle, with the ideas and ideals of worker discretion and autonomy, and with the notion that decision authority needs to flow to where expertise sits” (Dekker, 2020, p. 2)

But with the caveat that this needs to be done intentionally and mindfully. And not in a way that leaves a vacuum of safety operations and practices:

“But an unanticipated effect of deregulation has been not a reduction but a displacement of rulemaking, documentation and inspection activities.” (Dekker, 2020, p. 2)

3. What governments can do after neoliberalism As for the questions of what governments can do this is split in two parts of reassertion of ownership as well as re-regulation. However this re-regulation needs to then take a new form, away from pure expectation of compliance and towards a Safety II mindset of safety management:

“Some regulators have become interested in more formally examining why things go right (consistent with Safety II principles (Hollnagel, 2017)), and trying to enhance or assure the presence of the capacities (or ‘resilience potentials’) in an organization’s people, pro- cesses and systems that make it so (Jacobsen, 2017).” (Dekker, 2020, p. 3)

4. What organizations can do after neoliberalism And finally the opportunities of organisations post neoliberalism which reads in this paper like the hardest (but also maybe most important) part of the shift. First of all the almost natural tendency of “solving safety with bureaucracy” needs to be tackled:

“as soon as safety is involved, there seems to be an irresistible push towards a wider scope of norms, procedures and processes, whatever the context” (Dekker, 2020, p. 3)

“A recent poll in the mining industry showed that the majority “of the workforce feels things are being imposed on them that add no value, wastes their time, adds to their frustration and, at worst, creates a disconnect by removing control over their work”” (Dekker, 2020, p. 3)

What this de-buraeucratizing of safety management looks like is again related to the first point of recognising front-line expertise:

“De-bureaucratizing safety means putting safety expertise closer to the nuances, ‘messy details’ and quotidian risks of actual practice—as well as to operational decision-makers (CAIB, 2003; Galison, 2000; Roe, 2013; Woods, 2006).” (Dekker, 2020, p. 3)

And also an emphasis on collaboration, relation, and empathy that is achieved through working together towards a common goal (safer operations) rather than imposing rules and regulations:

“deliberately avoided using bureaucratized safety systems, and instead built on their collective responsibility for mitigating risk by reframing official safety programs in terms of kinship—specifically the ties of relatedness crew members create with each other in their everyday work.” (Dekker, 2020, p. 3)

The paper then talks about participatory equality and workers’ compensation as a an area to change after neoliberalism. While not directly related to safety management they are outlined as requirements for changes to become sustainable.

“One is participatory equality: the actual, meaningful involvement that workers have in decisions about the design, preconditions, implementation, execution, circumstances, monitoring and remuneration of their work—including of course those aspects to do with safety.” (Dekker, 2020, p. 3)

And equally important is the shift way from the neoliberalism induced view of risk and injuries being a sole responsibility of the worker and attempts for improvements stopping there instead of looking at organisations as a whole:

“The individualization of workplace risk, or ‘responsibilization,’ re- fers to safety programs and violation notices targeted at workers, not companies, which has helped tilt the distribution of work-related injury costs in favor of corporate interests” (Dekker, 2020, p. 4)

The paper then closes with an overview of safety and global capitalism after neoliberalism in which studies are examined that found a correlation “between economic globalisation and the probability of industrial accidents”. And interestingly also a negative correlation to free speech:

“In particular, freedom of speech is negatively correlated with industrial disasters.” (Dekker, 2020, p. 4)

And the concludes with the conclusion that complex risk in safety after neoliberalism should be approached by

“trusting and enabling practitioner decision discretion; by finding a new balance between written guidance and risk appetite, between professional judgment and risk competence.” (Dekker, 2020, p. 5)

Personal Thoughts

I initially had quite a lot of problems following the argument from neoliberalism to essentially the description of Safety I management of incidents and safety as a whole. Originally I saw the inverse as more logical. And even though it is addressed in the paper as “Deregulation aligns, in spirit and in principle, with the ideas and ideals of worker discretion and autonomy, and with the notion that decision authority needs to flow to where expertise sits” (Dekker, 2020, p. 2)" it took me some mind bending to make this make sense in my head. I also don’t really have any background in learning or even thinking much about neoliberalism, so there’s a good chance I’m missing some stuff. But overall I liked how the paper made me think about these two concepts (safety management and neoliberalism) that I had never thought about in relation to each other.