Segregation and Integration

Indeed, the influence of such acronyms and the use of safety management systems can be readily found in how people talk about safety within the context of its practice. For example, phrases like  

Establishing safety as an active participant in the site environment also gives it a unique identity within this context and inevitably this identity is distinct from the identities of the other social participants, i.e. the individuals that make up the site workforce. As a result, responsibility for safety has also shifted to this new entity, which potentially negates any significant responsibility or ownership of safety by the workforce, in terms of their understandings or actions safety has actually been constructed as the key participant in its own manifestation. 

This has significant consequences in terms of practice. If safety is understood to be a separate entity, although present on site it is not necessarily engaged, and is therefore likely to be kept apart from the more prominent considerations of production. 

Although it could be suggested that positioning safety as a separate entity is a simple rhetorical manifestation of reference to an abstract concept, reflective of safety management systems, it is equally suggestible that it is prec/se/y the associations with ownership and responsibility that are important here, and have actually helped develop our shared understandings. In constructing safety in this way, it is set apart from any personal responsibility, ownership or action and ultimately becomes either its own, or more likely within the context, someone else s responsibility. 

This will also have been influenced by the polarisation of safety as explored in Chapter 5. The familiar labels of safe/unsafe may simply be too remote from the fluid and changeable environments of the site, which in turn has led to resistance in the development of a shared construction of safety that is fully integrated with practice, and instead resulted in its establishment outside of productive work in the form of an essentially excluded entity. 

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As part of the preparation and planning for inclusion, Bamardos had commissioned a re view 0 f research relating to segregated and integrated education. Although brief, the report concluded that ... 

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