Public Health Commons^™

Hard Or Soft? The Relationship Between Power And Organisational Incident Rates, Susanne Bahn, Llandis Barratt-Pugh

Llandis Barratt-Pugh

This paper examines the power that managers have to impact on workplace safety and how in mixed method studies our preconceptions about the hardness and softness of the relevant data may be misplaced. The civil construction industry (CCI) in WA provides the case for this discussion. Workers in this industry are constantly battling between safety compliance and production pressures in an era of economic boom. The examination of 3,882 incident reports, upon which this paper’s conclusions are drawn, revealed that these ‘‘hard’’ data may often obscure incidents that occur as organisations may be pressured into providing reportable incident figures that …