A morbidly fascinating and articulate collection of essays, this book explores the grim underside of America's cult of the automobile and the disturbing, frequently conspiratorial, speculations that arise whenever the car becomes the cause or the site of human death. Through analysis of fatal celebrity car accidents and other examples of death by automobile, as well as through personal memoir and forensic reports, cultural critics ponder our very human fascination with the car crash. Topics include the roles and experiences of passengers and bystanders, car crash conspiracy theories, the automobile as a site of murder, studies of car crash cinema, and psychological interpretations of the notion of the 'accident.' The book features original essays by such underground icons as Kenneth Anger and Adam Parfrey.

As leaders increasingly understand the importance of good safety practice to support their business objectives, safety and health practitioners develop better tools and solutions. However, there is still a gulf between these two groups where engagement, communication and shared understanding can be found lacking. From Accidents to Zero opens up the field of safety culture and breaks it down into bite-sized pieces to facilitate new, critical thought and inspire practical action. Based on the concept of creating safety, as opposed to just preventing accidents, each of the 26 chapters in this user-friendly book includes explanation, commentary, reflections and practical activities designed to systematically and sustainably improve workplace safety culture. Core topics range from behaviour to values, daily rituals to unsafe acts, felt leadership to trust. Andrew Sharman's practical guide blends current academic thinking with authoritative guidance and sets up the opportunity for all parts of the organization to close the gap by providing very clear steps to thinking and acting differently. It sparks insight into how both traditional methods and novel approaches can be brought to life in real world situations. From Accidents to Zero offers a clear route to culture change through over one hundred pragmatic ideas to motivate and lead people, influence behaviour and drive a positive evolution in workplace safety.

This book provides traffic safety researchers and practitioners with an international and multi-disciplinary compendium of theoretical and methodological concepts relevant to the research and application of Traffic Safety Culture aiming towards a vision of zero traffic fatalities.

Building on the revolutionary Institute of Medicine reports To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, Keeping Patients Safe lays out guidelines for improving patient safety by changing nurses' working conditions and demands. Licensed nurses and unlicensed nursing assistants are critical participants in our national effort to protect patients from health care errors. The nature of the activities nurses typically perform â€" monitoring patients, educating home caretakers, performing treatments, and rescuing patients who are in crisis â€" provides an indispensable resource in detecting and remedying error-producing defects in the U.S. health care system. During the past two decades, substantial changes have been made in the organization and delivery of health care â€" and consequently in the job description and work environment of nurses. As patients are increasingly cared for as outpatients, nurses in hospitals and nursing homes deal with greater severity of illness. Problems in management practices, employee deployment, work and workspace design, and the basic safety culture of health care organizations place patients at further risk. This newest edition in the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine Quality Chasm series discusses the key aspects of the work environment for nurses and reviews the potential improvements in working conditions that are likely to have an impact on patient safety.

Building on the success of the 2007 original, Dekker revises, enhances and expands his view of just culture for this second edition, additionally tackling the key issue of how justice is created inside organizations. The goal remains the same: to create an environment where learning and accountability are fairly and constructively balanced. The First Edition of Sidney Dekker’s Just Culture brought accident accountability and criminalization to a broader audience. It made people question, perhaps for the first time, the nature of personal culpability when organizational accidents occur. Having raised this awareness the author then discovered that while many organizations saw the fairness and value of creating a just culture they really struggled when it came to developing it: What should they do? How should they and their managers respond to incidents, errors, failures that happen on their watch? In this Second Edition, Dekker expands his view of just culture, additionally tackling the key issue of how justice is created inside organizations. The new book is structured quite differently. Chapter One asks, ‘what is the right thing to do?’ - the basic moral question underpinning the issue. Ensuing chapters demonstrate how determining the ‘right thing’ really depends on one’s viewpoint, and that there is not one ‘true story’ but several. This naturally leads into the key issue of how justice is established inside organizations and the practical efforts needed to sustain it. The following chapters place just culture and criminalization in a societal context. Finally, the author reflects upon why we tend to blame individual people for systemic failures when in fact we bear collective responsibility. The changes to the text allow the author to explain the core elements of a just culture which he delineated so successfully in the First Edition and to explain how his original ideas have evolved. Dekker also introduces new material on ethics and on caring for the’ second victim’ (the professional at the centre of the incident). Consequently, we have a natural evolution of the author’s ideas. Those familiar with the earlier book and those for whom a just culture is still an aspiration will find much wisdom and practical advice here.

There is now an extensive literature on the social and environmental consequences of living in the risk society. Studies of trauma are also increasingly prominent. But scant attention has been paid to perceptions of risk and danger in the past — in particular, to the history of accidents and the meanings of the accidental. This collection of interdisciplinary essays addresses this lacuna providing a theoretically informed historical sociology of the accident and risk. It explores the social and cultural contexts in which ‘acts of God', calamities, catastrophes, disasters, injuries, casualties, and other category of ‘mishaps' were experienced, conceptualized and responded to. Drawing on the skills of British, European and North American scholars, Accidents in History combines philosophical, sociological and ecological overviews with in-depth historical case-studies. It spans the period from the eighteenth century to the present, probing the epistemological, social and political roots of the accidental. The authors differentiate between industrial and other forms of injury; trace the origins of the normalization of accidents; and analyze the interactions and gendered discrepancies between domestic and non-domestic mishaps. They also investigate the medicalization of sudden injury, and discuss the emergence of new socio-medical and humanitarian discourses around the organization of relief for victims.

Despite the fact that workplaces have implemented and followed new safety innovations and approaches, the majority of them have seen little, if any, significant progress in the reduction of accidental deaths and injuries. Changing the Workplace Safety Culture demonstrates that changing the way an organization views and practices safety will impact the behavior of all employees including executive and line managers. It delineates how safety culture change can be implemented and defines the roles of everyone in the safety culture, including management, employees, and unions and their members. Rather than focus on behavior-based safety measures, this book provides step-by-step procedures on how to establish a long-lasting integrated safety management system in any organization. It explores how to change the safety personality of an organization. The author covers the management principles and functions that need to be applied to bring about safety culture change and includes many real-life examples. He goes on to explain the activities needed to implement safety change and the benefits of getting others involved in the safety management system. The only way to ensure that accidents and their consequences are tackled at the source is to identify and eliminate the workplace risks before, rather than after, the event. To be truly effective, safety activities must be integrated into the day-to-day business and become a way of life for management and employees of the organization. This book provides a blueprint for creating an active safety culture that prevents accidents before they occur and becomes the key component in ongoing safety success.