# Taming Prometheus: Talk about Safety and Culture

*Silbey · Safety & Error, Culture & Context · Annual Review of Sociology · 2009 · Open access*

A sociological critique of safety culture discourse, identifying three conceptions — culture as attitude, as engineered organisation, and as emergent and indeterminate. Argues that mainstream safety culture thinking deploys individualist, reductionist epistemologies that locate responsibility with lowest-status workers while ignoring power inequalities and competing interests. Sociological analysis of safety must address what the safety culture literature systematically elides.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/silbey-2009/
- **View the source paper:** https://web.mit.edu/ssilbey/www/pdf/safety_culture.pdf
- **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=silbey-2009

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- [WAI vs WAD](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-work-as-imagined-vs-work-as-done.md)
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