Producing Safety

This book explores working and learning practices in the context of safety within the Civil Construction Industry of Western Australia and specifically focuses on the relations between organisational safety values and current working practices, primarily focusing on the instrumental power of managers in organisations to produce safety. The book examines the values in action that permeate the workplace culture and mediate the daily practices of people working in this industry, and ultimately how they impact upon the minds and bodies of employees. The study provides insight into the working practices and discourses within this industry by exploring the space between rhetoric and reality, specifically in terms of managing actions. Patterns in the data illuminate particular relations between values and practices that can mediate improved regimes of occupational, safety and health practices within organisations in the Civil Construction Industry. At the core of this study is the assumption that managers have a set of continually evolving and competing values that influence and determine their relational impact upon workplace safety culture.