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Organisational culture is a concept often used to describe shared corporate values that affect and influence members’ attitudes and behaviours. Safety culture is a sub-facet of organisational culture, which is thought to affect members’ attitudes and behaviour in relation to an organisation's ongoing health and safety performance. However, the myriad of definitions of ‘organisational culture’ and ‘safety culture’ that abound in both the management and safety literature suggests that the concept of business-specific cultures is not clear-cut. Placing such ‘culture’ constructs into a goal-setting paradigm appears to provide greater clarity than has hitherto been the case. Moreover, as yet there is no universally accepted model with which to formulate testable hypotheses that take into account antecedents, behaviour(s) and consequence(s). A reciprocal model of safety culture drawn from Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986. Social Foundation of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.) is offered so as to provide both a theoretical and practical framework with which to measure and analyse safety culture. Implications for future research to establish the model's utility and validity are addressed.

Many industries around the world are showing an increasing interest in the concept of ‘safety culture’ as a means of reducing the potential for large-scale disasters, and accidents associated with routine tasks. Publicly stated aims of achieving homogeneous worldwide safety cultures in the offshore (May, 1998), nuclear (Rosen, 1997) and shipping (Payer, 1998) industries testify to its growing importance. Although well intentioned, such aims also illustrate the confusion that surrounds the concept. This confusion appears to emanate from fragmented and unsystematic empirical efforts using underspecified theoretical concepts (Kennedy and Kirwan, 1995), that is perhaps due to a lack of an underlying integrative framework (Flin, 1998) which can be used to guide examinations of the safety culture construct in a wide range of contexts.

Many definitions of organisational safety culture tend to focus on the way people think or behave. However, most research investigating this culture construct has tended to focus solely on the way people think (i.e. their values, beliefs, attitudes, perceptions) about various aspects of safety, via safety climate measures, which have tended to be used as surrogate measures of safety culture. Issues related to situational constraints and people's actual behaviour have tended to be ignored. This may be due to the broadness of the many safety culture definitions that make it difficult to operationalise the concept in a consistent manner. A conceptualisation of the safety culture ‘product’ is offered here with which to provide a dependent variable, that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the many goal-directed manipulations that researchers may adopt when examining safety culture. Research also appears to have ignored the purpose of safety culture. Logic informs us that any attempts to develop or otherwise improve safety culture must, by definition, be goal directed. As such it is recommended that researchers adopt a goal-setting paradigm that views the creation of a safety culture as a super-ordinate goal, which is achieved by developing and pursuing multiple sub-goals. One advantage of doing so is that we do not have to re-invent the wheel as much goal-setting research has already identified the many moderators and mediators that influence goal achievement. Consistent with the goal-setting paradigm, accident-causation research, and triangulation methodology, a reciprocal model of safety culture is also offered to allow the dynamic, multi-faceted, holistic nature of the safety culture construct to be more fully examined, at many different levels of an organisation. The sheer number of research issues generated by this reciprocal model demonstrates the current limitations of our collective knowledge about the safety culture construct. It is imperative, therefore, that we take a much broader view if we are to guide the theoretical development of the safety culture construct and those organisational practices that reduce injuries and save lives.