A culture of prevention - Theory and practice of risk behavior

From the end of the 19th century onwards, rapidly expanding Western industry was confronted with the limits of purely technical means to avoid accidents when carrying out activities that were becoming intrinsically more and more dangerous. In the second half of the twentieth century, the managerial approach that had gradually taken hold, first in the field of production management, then in that of quality, was gradually formally applied to other aspects hitherto regarded as externalities, such as environmental impacts or the health and safety of workers and local residents, as these aspects became economic and social issues.

Although they undeniably contributed to improving performance in these areas, neither the acceleration of technological progress at the time, nor the deployment of the systemic management approach alone enabled satisfactory levels of safety to be achieved in a context of increasing societal scrutiny, particularly in high-risk industries. A hitherto neglected factor, outside their sphere of competence, has begun to arouse the interest of engineers and managers in charge of prevention: the human factor. From the 1980s onwards, certain pioneering sectors (chemicals, oil & gas, nuclear power, aerospace, etc.) in the English-speaking world, and the USA in particular, began to roll out programs aimed at "controlling" individual behavior.

The origins of behavior-based safety lie in classical behaviorism. At the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, this trend evolved to incorporate advances in neurology concerning attention, memory and the formation of habits and automatisms, as well as the cognitive, affective and social dimensions of individuals and group dynamics.

This cultural influence on the behavior of individuals within a group is now recognized in all their activities and in all societies. The concept of safety culture, which emerged in 1986 in the wake of two major accidents, is at the heart of a major change in the way we conceive of the place and role of people in a prevention approach.

You only have to have traveled abroad or visited various companies to realize just how different risk tolerance is among different groups of people. Some practices are widespread in one country or company, while they are only marginal in the next. Sometimes the rules that have been formally established to regulate these behaviors are not the same; other times these rules are similar, or even identical, but they are not respected with the same rigor.

It's no coincidence that certain practices are shared (or not) by entire communities, even if their members are sometimes geographically distant. The shared history of the individuals who make them up has, over time, forged...