Safety culture: a legal standard for commercial aviation.

Although a link between organisational safety culture and human behaviour is well established within academic literature, ambiguity about the actual nature of the causal relationship has inhibited its practical application. This thesis aims to establish a legal standard of safety culture by producing a model which describes the relationship between organisational safety culture and potential corporate liability. The model, called d3SC, attempts to promote a defence of due diligence to potential prosecution by improving an organisation’s safety culture. The thesis consists of three sequential studies. The first study comprises of twenty-six accident case studies from which data is developed into a prototype model through a process of grounded theory. The subsequent studies then take the emergent model from a construct to a risk management tool that was applied and tested against a real-world data from commercial aviation and law. In attempting to develop a model, d3SC, the thesis has adopted a predominantly functionalist approach. However, it is recognised that the complexities of culture and causation are not sufficiently represented without adopting some methods of real world analysis. This recognition of the need to dig deeper into organisational dynamics is manifest in the use of qualitative methods in the thesis to triangulate the output of the d3SC process. It is also represented in the units of measurement or case studies from which safety culture is frequently described. The quality of safety culture is often described in terms of organisational performance yet a consistent theme in both the literature and the data collated in these studies, shows that aggregating organisational safety culture as a singular measurement can be misleading. Contrasting the data from different departments and hierarchical levels within an organisation gives a much deeper and contextual understanding of internal dynamics and influences. This is of particular relevance to corporate liability in the aftermath of an accident. Prosecuting agencies will not focus their investigation on the adequacy of overall metrics of organisational assessments, but on the perceived causal links between an accident and the weaker areas of organisational safety culture. By improving the visibility and understanding of the causal links between corporate liability and corporate culture it is hoped that this research can contribute to enhancing safety standards in commercial aviation.