The Responsibilization Strategy of Health and Safety: Neo-liberalism and the Reconfiguration of Individual Responsibility for Risk

Gray, Garry C.

doi:10.1093/bjc/azp004

Cited by 149 publications

(124 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Another crucial aspect of OHS management is responsibility sharing between employers and employees, and historically reconfiguration of responsibility characterises workplace safety. [19] Usually according to employment law, dealing with OHS issues is mainly the employers' responsibility (for instance according to the EU OHS Framework Directive). Also, as Hasle and Zwetsloot [18, p. 961] remind us the concept of OHS management systems have historically considered it an issue for management and not for workers, and only lately has the employees' role been shifted from information providers to stronger participation, but also increasing workers responsibility for their own safety at work.…”

Section: The Effect Of Safety Culture On Employee Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The determinants of employee participation in occupational health and safety management

Masso

2015

International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics

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This article focuses on employee direct participation in occupational health and safety (OHS) management. The article explains what determines employee opportunities to participate in OHS management. The explanatory framework focuses on safety culture and safety management at workplaces. The framework is empirically tested using Estonian cross-sectional, multilevel data of organizations and their employees. The analysis indicates that differences in employee participation in OHS management in the Estonian case could be explained by differences in OHS management practices rather than differences in safety culture. This indicates that throughout the institutional change and shift to the European model of employment relations system, change in management practices has preceded changes in safety culture which according to theoretical argument is supposed to follow culture change.

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Section: The Effect Of Safety Culture On Employee Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The determinants of employee participation in occupational health and safety management

Masso

2015

International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics

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“…Chikudate 2009;Collinson 1999;Gray 2009;MacEachen 2000;Packer 2003;Zoller 2003aZoller , 2003b) rarely adopt detailed discourse analytic approaches and therefore pay less attention to the negotiating powers of human communication, and (b) because the detailed discourse analytic studies that are available regarding meetings (Iedema 2003;Jarzabkowski and Seidl 2008;Wodak, Kwon, and Clarke 2011;Rasmussen 2011a) focus primarily on the chair's discursive moves. What the study shows is how meetings are used for the purpose of responsibilization, to make employees visible and accountable for risk management.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Chikudate 2009;Collinson 1999;Gray 2009;MacEachen 2000;Packer 2003;Zoller 2003aZoller , 2003b, although without focusing on communication as a responsibility or examining discourse in a detailed way as done in the present study. This chapter will allow for a more detailed analysis of responsibilization through a focus on the local, "microscopic" discursive practices that Foucault (1978, 99f) ascribes constitutive capacity.…”

Section: The Governing Of Organizations and Risksmentioning

confidence: 95%

Governing safe operations at a distance

Rasmussen¹

2016

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture

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This chapter argues that today's organizational risk management, where employees are to adopt routines for proper self-control, is fruitfully approached as what Rose and Miller (1992) term governing-at-a-distance. Governing that relies on internal control and the self-governing capacity of citizens requires people to be involved in communication that signifies responsible behaviour. If there is hierarchical monitoring, then it is communication that is supervised which makes the signifying practices all the more important. While previous research has demonstrated that an increasing burden of responsibility is placed on citizens for the risks and health problems they face or envisage, less attention has been paid to the increased communication requirements this development involves. Bridging this gap, this chapter investigates how social interaction in meetings works to facilitate employees to become responsible risk communication subjects. An intensive discourse analysis of five safety meeting episodes demonstrates how the responsibilization of employees' risk communication extends questions of a) form -such as the duration of talk, b) paper work, c) genuineness, d) contributing on-topic, e) economization, and f) reliability regardless of illness and place. The study takes inspiration from positioning analysis (e.g. Bamberg, 2005), allowing for a detailed account of the moment-to-moment process of responsibilization, something that previous research on risk management tends to skim over.

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“…In other words, in the quantitative conceptualisation of risk or its 'commodification', there is an active negation of humanity, ultimately in favour of a cost calculation of replacement 'human resources'. The costs of the 'burden' of regulation on free enterprise can be counterposed to those real risk burdens imposed upon workers who are themselves 'responsibilized' for safety failures' (Gray 2009). Yet today, ailing capitalism, having patently failed to 'self-regulate' through market forces, is supported by state and supranational interventions of unprecedented magnitudes.…”

Section: Charles Woolfson Linko¨ping University Swedenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialogue & Debate: Labour, Constitution and A Sense of Measure: A Debate with Alain Supiot

Christodoulidis

Dukes

Supiot³

et al. 2010

Social & Legal Studies

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The paper 'A sense of measure' that we publish in this section was Alain Supiot's contribution to a series of workshops organised at the School of Law of the University of Glasgow, in autumn 2009, on the general theme of 'constitutionalising employment relations'. The underlying idea for the seminars was to ask the question of labour law as a question of constitutional law; to cut across the categorical distinctions that are taken, increasingly, as given between the public sphere and the workplace. The entrenchment of this distinction between public sphere and workplace obscures the fact that significantly similar forms of powerlessness and vulnerability affect both citizens and workers. The emphasis on constitutionalisation marked the attempt to recover an earlier vocabulary of labour law; one that did not undercut the expression in anything but market terms of the creation of value and the stakes of the employment relation. The original impetus for our project was a shared concern that much of what has been written about labour law over the past 10 years or so emphasised a move away from traditional conceptions of its function of redressing asymmetries in the respective positions of employers and workers through protective measures, towards a full-blown market paradigm focused on maximizing flexibility. Together with this development, there seemed to be a growing perception that 'old ways' of regulating employment relations had become inappropriate. Instead, there was discussion of the benefits of minimal or 'light'The papers published in this section were presented at the second of three workshops on the theme, 'Constitutionalising Employment Relations'. We are grateful to Social & Legal Studies, the Modern Law Review and the School of Law, University of Glasgow for providing financial support for the workshops.

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The Responsibilization Strategy of Health and Safety: Neo-liberalism and the Reconfiguration of Individual Responsibility for Risk

Cited by 149 publications

References 22 publications

The determinants of employee participation in occupational health and safety management

The determinants of employee participation in occupational health and safety management

Governing safe operations at a distance

Dialogue & Debate: Labour, Constitution and A Sense of Measure: A Debate with Alain Supiot

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