Safety and Security: The Challenges of Bringing Them Together

Abstract

This chapter looks back at how safety and security have developed in hazardous technologies and activities, explaining what has become an intersection between the two in both strategies and management practices. We argue for the connection to be made between social expectations of safe and secure societies and the limits to management and technical performance. In the first part of the chapter, conceptual similarities and differences are addressed and we distinguish three scientific and contextual vantage points for addressing how safety and security are converging: the conceptual approach, the technical and methodological approach, and the management and practice approach. We then go on to show that, as professional areas, safety and security have developed in different ways and supported by quite separate scientific and technological fields. Finally, we present the organization of the book.

Towards Interdependent Safety Security Assessments Using Bowties

“…This work is by no means the first exploration of combining security and safety [1,12,14,19,20]. Existing work in the area also highlights that this is by no means an easy feat as there are several differences as an outcome of developing in completely different contexts [12]. Gould and Bieder [12] explore the initial development of the two fields and the contexts in which they coexist.…”

“…Existing work in the area also highlights that this is by no means an easy feat as there are several differences as an outcome of developing in completely different contexts [12]. Gould and Bieder [12] explore the initial development of the two fields and the contexts in which they coexist. Safety is originally developed as means to avoid systems failures guided by the increased understanding of hazards and inevitability of accidents.…”

“…The two fields however are strongly interconnected and as such their integration is essential. The authors propose the need for new policies and shared practice as without the other neither field can be complete and neither safe nor secure [12]. This recent work highlights the need to unify the assessment techniques, although they do not provide intuition as to how to do so.…”

Standardising policy in a nonstandard way: a public/private standardisation process in Norway

“…Security refers here to risks posed by intentional, malicious acts, unlike safety risks , related to accidents and natural disasters (Jore 2019). As professional areas, security and safety come from different traditions (Pettersen Gould and Bieder 2020); security has been linked to defence and crime prevention, and safety to areas such as engineering and management. The policy in this analysis, the risk assessment approach, differs from traditional understandings of risk, where risk is presented as a combination of probability and consequence.…”