“To Him Who Has, More Will Be Given…”: A Realist Review of the OHSAS18001 Standard of OHS Management

Christian Uhrenholdt Madsen, Marie Louise Kirkegaard, Peter Hasle, Johnny Dyreborg

Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapport/konference proceedingKonferenceartikel i proceedingForskningpeer review

1 Citationer (Scopus)
252 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The OHSAS18001 standard is now the most widely adopted management systems for occupational health and safety worldwide. The standard is intended to support companies in attaining a higher health and safety standard. However, there is limited knowledge on how this standard in fact is working in practice and thus can improve health and safety at work.

In order to investigate how the OHSAS18001 standard is working in practice, we identified the main mechanisms assumed to be actively involved in the successful implementation and management of the standard, by using a framework inspired by a realist methodology. In line with this methodology, we assessed how the context of the adopting organizations impinges on the identified mechanisms and synthesized the findings into useful knowledge for practitioners and fellow researchers alike.

The starting point for the analytical process is the program theories that we identified in the standard and supplementary materials from key stakeholders. Thus we analyze how key stakeholders and policymakers expect the standard or program theory to work when it is implemented in an organizational setting. The three program theories (PT) we identified are: An ‘operational’ PT, a ‘compliance’ PT, and an ‘institutional’ PT.

Then we compared these ‘assumed’ program theories to how the OHSAS18001 actually worked in real-life settings. We identified four so-called context-mechanism-outcome configurations by reviewing available empirical studies and by extracting knowledge from them. These CMO-configurations are: ‘Integration’, ‘learning’, ‘motivation’ and ‘translation’. This analytical approach means that our paper provides both i -depth understanding of the assumed program theories behind the OHSAS18001standard and understanding of the actual mechanisms of certified management systems in occupational health and safety management in various context presented by the included implementation studies.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TitelProceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018) - Volume IV : Organizational Design and Management ODAM, Professional Affairs, Forensic
RedaktørerSebastiano Bagnara, Thomas Alexander, Yushi Fujita, Riccardo Tartaglia, Sara Albolino
Antal sider10
ForlagSpringer
Publikationsdatoaug. 2018
Udgave4
Sider140-149
ISBN (Trykt)978-3-319-96079-1
ISBN (Elektronisk)978-3-319-96080-7
DOI
StatusUdgivet - aug. 2018
Begivenhed20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, IEA 2018 - Florence, Italien
Varighed: 26 aug. 201830 aug. 2018

Konference

Konference20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, IEA 2018
Land/OmrådeItalien
ByFlorence
Periode26/08/201830/08/2018
NavnAdvances in Intelligent Systems and Computing
Vol/bind821
ISSN2194-5357

Citationsformater