In industrialized nations, occupational health and safety (OHS) has been a growing concern in many businesses for at least two decades. Legislation, regulation, and standards have been developed in order to provide organizations with a framework for practicing accident and illness prevention and placing worker well-being at the center of production system design. However, the occurrence of several accidents continues to show that OHS performance evaluation is subject to interpretation. In this review of the literature, we outline the scope of current research on OHS status and performance evaluation and comment on the suitability of the instruments being proposed for field use. This study is based on a keyword-based bibliographical search in the largest scientific databases and OHS-related websites, which allowed us to identify 15 OHS performance evaluation tools. Our principal conclusion is that researchers in the field have shown little interest in generalizing the instruments of OHS performance evaluation and that none of the 15 tools examined is properly applicable to any real organization outside of the sector of activity, economic scale, and jurisdiction for which it was designed.

Growth of the world population and the globalization of trade are the origins of the fourth industrial revolution, called “Industry 4.0”. What engineers call systems are becoming more and more complex as businesses strive to stay competitive and meet ever-changing demand. While automation and information digitization and transmission technologies are increasingly becoming major assets in modern industries, the changes they bring are having an impact on the management of occupational health and safety.The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the progress achieved in the understanding of complex systems and to test some of the published theory by comparing it to a case study. The major scientific databases were searched to retrieve the literature on complexity, and a large company in the steel products business was queried to determine how its complexity as perceived by its managerial staff compares to the theory of complex systems.Our main conclusion is that, based on the data gathered in the case study, the perception that the managerial staff has of the company corresponds closely to the current definition of complex systems as proposed by researchers. However, it remains to be determined whether this correspondence holds over the range of business sizes.