1,720,998 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Il/legitimate risks? Occupational health and safety and the public in Britain, c. 1960-2015
Get PDFThe last 20 years have seen the emergence of a popular climate of antipathy towards occupational health and safety regulation within the UK, particularly within the mainstream British media. The governance of health and safety has thus in recent years become an increasingly visible and contested public and political issue. The extent of this contestation, and its impact on the State’s governance of health and safety in the workplace and beyond, is explained and historicized within this chapter. Why has public rhetoric about health and safety apparently become so important in framing the ways in which the State could legitimately act in recent years? The chapter demonstrates how since 1960 the State remained a significant player – one among many, admittedly – and that while its roles in managing health and safety had long been bounded by a number of factors, a variable that emerged with particular saliency over the last 20 years has been a mediated notion of ‘public opinion’. This focus serves to remind us of the ways in which State action has at certain moments been pushed in particular directions by factors beyond formal mechanisms of rule
Risk on the Roads: Police, Motor Traffic and the Management of Space, c. 1900–50
No full textExploring the police’s role in managing road risks, Williams’ chapter focuses on two interrelated elements: engineering solutions to dangers, including the design of streets and roads, and the ways in which police officers extended their authority and claims to expertise in terms of determining policy and the management of traffic-related risks. Demonstrating how practices were shaped by the interests and priorities of professionals and experts, he argues that the police pushed debates in terms of infrastructure rather than a greater presence on the streets, yet still sought to retain power and responsibility for traffic risks rather than letting it shift to other agencies. Crucial to this was the police’s ability to deploy knowledge of accidents by their mastery of statistics, and by their durability and latency as an organization
Recommended from our members
Do the public have a problem with health and safety?
No full textMost people would like to think that their job makes a useful contribution to society. Surely there are few things more worthwhile than ensuring that every worker goes home safely at the end of their shift? It comes as something of a shock, then, when members of the professions and organizations concerned with health and safety find themselves on the end of political and media criticism as lacking common sense and obstructing growth and competitiveness in UK industry. They may look back to a time when the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 was passed, apparently with the support of a broad public and policy consensus. Now they are the object of reviews intended to remove ‘red tape’ and reduce the ‘burden’ of regulation. How did we get ‘here’ from ‘there’? What has happened over the last fifty years to undermine the view of the HSWA as a high-water mark of social progress? How has ‘elf ’n safety’ come to be treated with derision? What can the health and safety professions and organizations learn from that experience to help them develop appropriate policies in the future
- …
