Work-Related Deaths as Symbolic Events

The coimterpoint to compliance-based enforcement is the punishment school, sometimes also termed the sanctioning (Hawkins 1984) and 

Contemporary health and safety regulation tends to draw more heavily upon the compliance rather than the deterrence approach UK safety regulators have always prioritised the provision of guidance and advice over prosecution (Carson 1970 1979 Hawkins 2002), and the same can be said of regulators elsewhere (see Chapter 2). The current tendency is for versions of risk-based regulation to be used, whereby enforcement resources are targeted at those regulated actors who are deemed 

Both economics-based and critical approaches to deterrence accord with this instrumental logic, viewing enforcement as a way of producing compliance with the law by rendering the costs associated with 

as Black acknowledges (2005 546), problems arise when the concerns of the system and the individuals within it conflict. Risk-based regulation is not about moral or normative desert. It aims to systematise 

Instrumentalism in the definition and measurement of work-related death 

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