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BackgroundConstruction Safety Nova Scotia has started to invest in research on how organizations can better understand and improve their safety culture. Affiliate construction firms have volunteered to undergo a safety culture assessment and a follow-up intervention program designed to address areas of improvement identified in their assessment.ObjectiveBruce Collins, General Manager of Nova Scotia Construction Safety, will discuss his experiences from an ongoing industry-wide safety culture initiative. Bruce will share the successes and challenges of the project and his insight on how to implement a similar initiative in your industry.MethodsGiven the composition of the construction industry (i.e., the majority of firms only have 2–5 employees), a provincial construction safety association, Construction Safety Nova Scotia, is in a prime position to access the network of independent construction firms and help assess their safety culture.FindingsTo date, the project has developed and validated a safety culture assessment, created an industry benchmark for the assessment, and has started industry-wide interventions based on common safety culture themes.ConclusionsBruce will discuss each of the project milestones and conclude with a recommendation for areas of future industry level safety culture research.Policy implicationsRequiring firms to undergo a mandatory safety culture assessments has already been implemented in industries that were early adopters of safety culture research (e.g., nuclear and aviation). In comparison, the construction industry is only in the early stages of safety culture adoption. Offering safety culture assessments to firms that are willing to voluntarily undergo the process is a starting point to build a case for future safety culture assessment requirements.

Why did large numbers of Northerners vote for the Democrats on the eve of the Civil War? This is a question which the most recent studies of Northern ante-bellum politics leave unanswered. Professor Formisano's pains-taking study of Michigan's party politics amply shows the eclectic character of the Republicans' appeal. Republicans combined a stern mixture of moral purpose and narrow puritanism with a powerful critique of the South. Republicanism emerges from Professor Foner's influential study as a species of stalwart, visionary parochialism quite irresistible to the northern electorate. It represented the self-satisfied affirmation that the proper maintenance of existing Protestant and entrepreneurial values in the socially harmonious North was essential to America's future growth. It also rested upon a belief in the need to resist Southern attempts to push slavery into the western territories. This belief stemmed from a defensive, slightly paranoid interpretation of the operation of federal politics. Congress and the federal administration in Democratic hands were, according to the Republicans, the merest tools of “ the Dominant Class in the Republic, ” the Southern slaveowners. Thus high faith in free society and deep fear of Southern expansion co-existed uneasily together. Republicans, in Eric Foner's view, articulated an ideology which merged together an over-arching notion of the good society (a basically non-class society, in which the ladder of status was short and its ascent easy, and in which the fundamental interests of labourers, farmers and small entrepreneurs were identical) with an immediate call to political action.