Repositioning safety

Despite the dominance of safe/unsafe within corporate literature and management systems, some documentation does seek to reposition safety away from this polarised construct within the realm of management. For example, the Health and Safety Executive HSG150 guidance document Health and Safety in Construction, HSG150 (2006 21) acknowledges the complex and ever-changing fluidity of safety, by the need for ... 

Put on your safety glasses. To make a rocket, fill a film canister about / full of water. Place the canister in the center of the pie pan. Break an Alka-Seltzer tablet into three piece of about equal size. Drop one of the pieces into the canister, snap on its top, and quickly invert the canister so its top is resting on the pie pan. Step back and wait. The pressure inside the canister increases due to the accumulation of carbon dioxide gas inside it. This pressure builds up until the canister body suddenly explodes from the pie pan launching pad. If the top of the canister is quickly replaced and the canister repositioned, another blast can occur. In fact, several blast-offs can be obtained with one Alka-Seltzer tablet. 

It is therefore unsurprising that away from the formal manifestations of legal requirements in safety management systems and documents, safety becomes much more fluid and flexible. When those who work on sites everyday try to adopt the polarised lexicon of safety with their own understandings of construction site life, it doesn t quite work. Evidence of this can be readily found in site-produced safety documentation (as opposed to formal corporate documents distributed by contractor head offices), such as induction slides, where the site team often try to reposition safe/ unsafe within a wider context examples of practice are given as they were in the earliest legislation, the acknowledgement of variation... 

Again this is associated with a level of flexibility within the reality of accepted behaviours, as well as the linked understandings of safety. Safety is not just one thing or the other, but something far more relative and fluid, and one that can be repositioned depending on its contexts. 

A flurry of reports in the media exaggerating doubts about the safety of food additives led many retailers and food manufacturers to eliminate certain additives or reposition existing products as free from one or more food additives or classes of food additives. 

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