How do organisational cultures influence safety? To answer this question requires a strategy for investigating organisational culture. There are various research strategies available. By far the most widely used is the perception survey. An alternative is for researchers is to immerse themselves in one or more organisations, making detailed observations about activities and drawing inferences about the nature of the organisation's culture (the ethnographic method). A third technique makes use of the wealth of material that is assembled by inquiries into major accidents. This paper describes how this material can be used to provide insights into organisational cultures. It draws on specific examples from the author's own work as well as the cultural analysis carried out by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. It concludes with some additional suggestions for carrying out research on safetyrelevant aspects of organisational culture.

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Perrow’s normal accident theory suggests that some major accidents are inevitable for technological reasons. An alternative approach explains major accidents as resulting from management failures, particularly in relation to the communication of information. This latter theory has been shown to be applicable to a wide variety of disasters. By contrast, Perrow’s theory seems to be applicable to relatively few accidents, the exemplar case being the Three Mile Island nuclear power station accident in the U.S. in 1979. This article re‐examines Three Mile Island. It shows that this was not a normal accident in Perrow’s sense and is readily explicable in terms of management failures. The article also notes that Perrow’s theory is motivated by a desire to shift blame away from front line operators and that the alternative approach does this equally well.

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF SAFE BEHAVIOUR PROGRAMS? Safe behaviour programs are currently a popular strategy for improving safety in large organizations. This paper provides a critical look at the assumptions which underly such programs and identifies some of their limitations. Safe behaviour programs run the risk of assuming that unsafe behaviour is the only cause of accidents worth focusing on. The reality is that unsafe behaviour is merely the last link in a causal chain and not necessarily the most effective link to focus on, for the purposes of accident prevention. One major drawback of these programs is that they miss critically important unsafe behaviour, such as attempts by workers to restart processes that have been temporarily interrupted. Conventional safe behaviour programs aimed at front line workers are also of no use in preventing accidents in which the behaviour of front line workers is not involved. Given that it is the behaviour of management which is most critical in creating a culture of safety in any organization, behavioural safety observations are likely to have their greatest impact if directed upwards, at managers. The paper concludes with an appendix about accident repeater programs which are sometimes introduced along with safe behaviour programs.