25th November 2000

Culture and Risk

'Culture' is now widely recognised as an important factor in both understanding and resolving risk issues. An awful lot of company activity professes to be aimed at effecting a 'culture change'. Yet, despite all this, the miracle cures to company ills that are supposed to result stubbornly fail to materialise.

Some further light has been shed on the reasons and how to move forward by a recent paper entitled 'Perspectives on Safety Culture' by AWA team member Dr Ian Glendon and Dr Neville Stanton in Safety Science 34 (2000) 193-214 (see www.elsevier.com/locate/ssci). Based on their paper at the IAAP Congress in San Francisco in 1998, the relationship between organisational culture, safety culture and safety climate is explored. The dominance in this area of functionalist thinking at the expense of more eclectic approaches is exposed as a key reason for failure of culture change programmes. Cultural measurement and benchmarking schemes, upon which culture change programmes often critically depend, often do not measure what they purport to. The paper supports Waring and Glendon's thesis in Managing Risk (see Books Section).

Ian Glendon's long-term research programme into cultural aspects of risk in organisations continues and is currently involving a number of large organisations in Australia, Hong Kong and UK.

Other recent papers on the subject from Alan Waring include Risk Management: The Culture Club in Insurance Times, 16 November 2000, page 24 (www.instimes.co.uk) and 'Global Trade: Cultural and Other Risks' in Strategic Risk, December 2000. (www.strategicrisk.co.uk).

For details of AWA consulting services in Cultural, Change and Human Resource Risks e-mail:
waringa@awa.demon.co.uk.

For Further Information Please Telephone:
(+357) 24824913
(+357) 99327865
(+44) 208 351 7457

Facsimile:
(+357) 24824913
(+44) 208 351 6562

For Further Information eMail:
waringa@cytanet.com.cy
waringa@awa.demon.co.uk

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