Management of Safety Rules: the Case of Railways

Every technology and activity has safety rules, which are usually formulated explicitly, taught to those operating in the system and imposed on them. Safety rules also determine liability after accidents. Yet there is very little systematic scientific or management literature on how to devise and manage safety rules. This paper uses a simple framework to draw together what is known of good and bad practice in this area, particularly in deciding what rules should be explicitly formulated and imposed. It draws on the literature on violations, on rule learning and on organizational control. The paper concludes with a case study of safety rules in the railways, derived from a larger European study of safety rule management for railway operations. It shows that the nature of the system dynamics and the current communications within railway operations result in a largely open loop operation of the system. This makes it vulnerable to any form of deviation from strictly defined operations. Safety rules are part of the apparatus to render the behaviour of the various people in the system sufficiently predictable that this openloop operation can succeed in a large proportion of situations. However this requires that adherence to rules is very strict and has great problems coping with any deviations, even those required to respond to situations which cannot be dealt with following the existing rules. This requirement conflicts with much of the available literature on organisational control and high reliability organisations. However, the more interactive derivation of rules specific to the range of system conditions requires a far greater communication between system operators than the railway system currently requires. The room for manoeuvre in optimising safety rule use in railways is therefore currently limited.