title: Setting culture apart: distinguishing culture from behavior and social structure in safety and injury research.
abstract: The concept of culture is now widely used by those who conduct research on safety and work-related injury outcomes. We argue that as the term has been applied by an increasingly diverse set of disciplines, its scope has broadened beyond how it was defined and intended for use by sociologists and anthropologists. As a result, this more inclusive concept has lost some of its precision and analytic power. We suggest that the utility of this "new" understanding of culture could be improved if researchers more clearly delineated the ideological - the socially constructed abstract systems of meaning, norms, beliefs and values (which we refer to as culture) - from concrete behaviors, social relations and other properties of workplaces (e.g., organizational structures) and of society itself. This may help researchers investigate how culture and social structures can affect safety and injury outcomes with increased analytic rigor. In addition, maintaining an analytical distinction between culture and other social factors can help intervention efforts better understand the target of the intervention and therefore may improve chances of both scientific and instrumental success.
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences, Injury Control Research Center, West Virginia University, PO Box 9190, Morgantown, WV 26506, United States. Electronic address: djmyers@hsc.wvu.edu.
authors.forename: Douglas J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Myers
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Burkhardt Building (BB), Room 315, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, United States. Electronic address: jnyce@bsu.edu.
authors.forename: James M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Nyce
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, School of Humanities, Griffith University, N16-2.18, Nathan Campus 4111, QLD, Australia. Electronic address: s.dekker@griffith.edu.au.
authors.forename: Sidney W A
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Dekker
mesh_terms: D000062:Accidents, Occupational / Q000517:prevention & control*; D015984:Causality; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D017146:Models, Organizational; D016272:Occupational Health; D015279:Organizational Culture; D017751:Safety Management
keywords: Anthropology; Causation; Culture; Hierarchy; Sociology