Safety Theater: How the Desire for Perfection Drives Compliance Clutter, Inauthenticity, and Accidents [Hardcover]

Safety Theater shows how our desire for perfection drives compliance clutter, inauthentic relationships with work-as-done, and new kinds of accidents. This hopeful, forward-looking book is the final instalment of a three-part series on the effects of neoliberalism, which promotes the role of the private sector in the economy.

Preface: Have we thought about this, or is it policy? Chapter 1: A perfectible world Chapter 2: Outlawing suffering: Perfecting the world of work Chapter 3: Meeting the target, missing the point Chapter 4: Now playing: Safety Theater Chapter 5: After high reliability Chapter 6: The challenges of complexity Chapter 7: Past the edge of chaos Chapter 8: Neoliberal accidents Chapter 9: Continental and analytical thinking about organizations Chapter 10: Pathways to authenticity Chapter 11: Escaping from Safety Theater

How is it possible that the desire for a perfectly safe world with perfectly safe workplaces helps generate the opposite? Safety Theater shows how our desire for perfection drives compliance clutter, inauthentic relationships with work-as-done, and new kinds of accidents. Written by the leading global voice on safety innovation today, Safety Theater takes us back to the Enlightenment and its aspiration toward a perfectible world through rationality and science, and explains how, by separating severity from injury rates two centuries later, we now hit our targets but miss the point. This hopeful, forward-looking book is the final volume in a three-part series on the effects of neoliberalism, which promotes the role of the private sector in the economy.

Showcasing a more caring kind of capitalismwhere free markets are free in a frame; where horizontal coordination replaces hierarchical control; where shareholders are not the only stakeholders; and where value and prosperity are alc(