Safety Science, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp.

157-158, 1996
Pergamon Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in the Netherlands
0925-7535/96 $15.00 + 0.00

Book Review
Safety Management Systems, by Alan Waring, Champion&Hall, London,
pp 241. ISBN 0-412-71910-X.

According to the author the purpose of the book is to provide all those who have a
responsibility for occupational health and safety management with a detailed reference guide
to the design, development and implementation of health and safety management systems
(SMS). The book seeks to provide a more complete and rounded approach to the subject than
is available elsewhere via a synthesis of the authors practical SMS experience and his
research-based knowledge of key topics such as safety culture and power issues which affect
success (for SMS). The above keywords in cursive, will be the basis for my comments and
critique. He provides a long list of actual audiences for the book, mostly professionals in
safety management and related areas at work, which includes lecturers and their students at
BSc., MSc., and other safety courses.
The book is split into two parts. Part One (chapters l-4) provides a general outline of
SMS, and Part Two (chapters 5-l 1) concentrates on practical requirements. Chapters 1 and 2
review and discuss basic systems theory back to von Bertalanffy, and relate general systems
approaches to international (ISO) standards on (quality) management and similar approaches.
Chapters 3 and 4 are on organisational functions and contexts. The practical requirements in
Part Two include subjects as goals, policy, strategy, planning, resources, implementation, risk
assessment, audit, and monitoring and measuring performance, including a wise warning
against unrealistic expectations of quick fix approaches to SMS.
The author starts with a straightforward description of basic principles of systems theory. I
miss a focus on the distinction between open and closed systems models, and the difficulties
and optional ways of defining system boundaries. The links between the general systems
approach and approaches to management systems and SMS are not presented in a convincing
way except for models of feedback loops. The author describes a sort of development in SMS
from mechanical clockwork models with simple feedback control systems, to socio-techni-
cal models and TQM, adding a human touch to the clock, and ending with what the
author calls a human activity system as something different and superior to the other
approaches. Except for phrases like focusing on people and addressing the complexity of
organisations I did not get any idea at all about what the new paradigm really means. As this
superior SMS model is not used in the applied and practical parts of the book, that did not
improve my understanding of the approach either. His critique of the mechanical SMS
models, by the way, the models that are the main framework for his Part Two, would have
been more convincing and more consistent if he had linked it to a cybernetic framework of
systems theory, e.g. perspectives as the law of requisite variety and orders of feedback
loops.
When linking the SMS models to standards and regulations he makes a critical comment
saying that certification to (SMS) standards does not necessarily show that the holder is any

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more a quality (or safe) organisation than an organisation that has none. I should have wished
that he had given more proofs on this statement and other statements in the book which I find
sensible but not documented by scientific empirical research or by convincing illustrative case
studies from industrial practice. The examples given in frames do not fill the educational
intentions of clarification. They represent a mixture of case descriptions, short references,
comments, and interpretations. I would have preferred pure case descriptions separately, and
the comments and discussions integrated in the running text.
Chapter 3 on the outer context of organisations gives an unstructured and descriptive
overview of the most important external actors, factors, and phenomena affecting companies
SMS. The framework of organisation contingency theory could have been used for the
structuring, and by that also provided a bridge to the next chapter on the inner context. This
chapter starts with a clarifying discussion of health and safety contributions to the organisa-
tional business goals and performances. However, in general the author has missed the rich
social science literature on organisations and organisational behaviour, and consequently the
contents and coverage of the subjects become lean and arbitrary. There is one exception: the
author penetrates the concepts of organisational culture and safety culture in a sensible way.
For the audience of the book with a narrow background in technology or economics, culture is
just a residual for what you do not understand, cannot explain or predict in your rational
models (a functionalist view in his words). The book makes you aware of these non-rational
aspects of SMS, and the presentation of cultural subjects may open this audience up to more
reflective perspectives (an interpretative view).
In Part Two, which represents 3/4 of the volume, the author presents and details the
structural SMS model of the book. It is representative for the mainstream of approaches to
development and implementation of SMS, one of many variants of problem-solving steps and
feedback in SMS processes addressing what the author calls a systematic approach in contrast
to the systemic perspectives of Part One. The overall structure of chapters 5-10 seems to be a
reasonable logical chain of inferences. But when looking at sections within the chapters the
logic disappears in a mixed presentation with uneven depth of principles, guidelines, check-
lists, tools, methods, and technique. It is not structured and detailed enough to fill the intention
of representing a detailed guide. You do not learn enough about the methods to use them, and
you do not get the critical reflections on their possibilities and limitations. An example: you
learn how to do a trend analysis on injury data; but, you do not get the basic principles in
statistics (significance testing and confidence intervals) which could have prevented managers
and safety experts from drawing conclusions on ups and downs from small numbers of
stochastic incidents.
The basic idea of the book as presented in the introduction of merging and synthesising
practical experience of SMS, with systems theory and research-based knowledge on organisa-
tion and management, seems both challenging and appealing to my own thinking about safety
management. I am sorry to conclude with the overall criticism that none of the purposes of the
book have been really fulfilled in an adequate and successful way. It is full of good intentions
of being complete and balanced, resulting in a synthesis of applicable new knowledge in the
field. There are some few pieces of the text where that is achieved, but in general the book
would have benefited from a clear choice between being a broad reference guide for
practitioners, or a book on new integrating paradigms for SMS based on scientific literature.

Jan Houden