Product safety culture: A new variant of safety culture?

Product safety culture concerns the organizational culture that affects the integrity and reliability of products and services and thus the safety of those using them. This is a new topic within the sphere of safety culture which has been adopted by manufacturing companies, e.g. in the food and defense sectors. The paper introduces the concept of product safety culture with reference to the available literature and then examines reported cases of product failures where the investigation has considered organizational precursors. Product safety culture seems to be a variant of safety culture that weighs particular cultural dimensions. These might be worthy of additional emphasis when managing worker and process safety. The dimension in particular that would merit exploration in product safety culture would be safety systems. Safety systems refer to organizational safety policies and procedures that are enacted through worker safety behaviors that may have an impact on product integrity, as considered in the accidents described in the paper. Research is required to examine the impact of product safety culture on product safety outcomes (e.g. failures) and to determine to what extent typical safety culture dimensions could be replicated in this aspect of culture, and whether novel dimensions should be considered. (author)