Eyes Wide Shut: Seeing the Safety Management System as a State

Abstract: Airlines are required to manage safety by implementing a Safety Management System (SMS). These systems are built on experience with quality management and seek to provide a structure for organisations to manage the risks presented by and to their individual operations. Safety is presented by the SMS as a ‘state of being’ arrived after following risk management to a level as low as reasonably practical. It is supported by international treaties, intra-national and domestic regulations. These lend significant legitimacy to the SMS and to the discourse that surrounds it. The SMS is claimed to assist corporate decision-making and presented as a pathway to safety by establishing the hazardous reality external to the organisation. However, the faith placed in this state of safety promised by the literature of SMS is misplaced. Within the industry there is debate about how an SMS can be judged as effective with differing views at different levels of the domain. Debate exists about what future work may be needed to better establish how this effectiveness may be judged. Critics of the SMS are uneasy with the faith placed in SMS outputs and the functionalist basis on which data is collected and interpreted. There is little critical appraisal of the SMS and it is presumed as a validated vehicle for safety. This is a view held with almost evangelical fervor in some cases. There is little scope to feed any criticism back to the architects of SMS. In this thesis it is argued that Safety Management Systems represent an example of the Authoritarian High Modernist approach to large scale social engineering projects. Such projects will fail given certain structural conditions, and this research highlights that these conditions are present in the discourse around SMS. SMS legitimacy presents an inertia that is resisting the change, iteration, development or the questioning of the effectiveness of the modern SMS. Rather than identifying hazards and assessing risks, Safety Management Systems can simply legitimise state or organisational decision-making without critical analysis. Yet there are positive aspects to SMS and benefits from its implementation in the provision of objects to discuss and negotiate between stakeholders. Without a pluralistic approach to hazard identification and risk management practices, the narrow epistemological methods of SMS can lead to clever safety bureaucracies but not to good safety management.