DEDICATED TO THE...
Profession of Safety Management
A profession is an occupation based on a required education. It is a special kind of work that requires support of an organized body of knowledge. It must have a common vocabulary and be backed by an accepted code of ethics.
Therefore, safety management, to be recognized as a profession, must create for itself a classification of principles and theories of its own. We can do this by learning about teachings and experience of other fields of science—especially that of management itself.
Management, according to scholars in the field, is a social science. As such, it is supported by many sound principles. Writers of management theory agree that social sciences are not exact when compared with the laws of physical sciences. But, it is a science. It has a set of truths.
These truths can be applied to the field of safety management. We can start with this truth:
Principle: Management is a social science and, as such, has a set of fundamental truths that form for it a body of organized knowledge. Therefore, it can be supported by many of the fundamental truths that now apply to management.
Assuming that our work is, or can be, “professional,” we can now proceed to examine the factual information needed to support it. L. A. Allen offers us encouragement by saying, in his book,
The Management Profession, that there is enough evidence to support all requirements for the support of a science of management.
Management students should never give up their search for truths. A scientific approach need not have exactness of a laboratory-tested fact. Had the physical and biological sciences made this demand, say Koontz and O’Donnell, man probably would be still rubbing sticks together to make his fire.
We have at our command a vast amount of facts and principles from other sciences, i.e., psychological, behavioral, sociological, etc. There is abundance of theory, logic and concept related to tactical management available to us from writings of historical and contemporary scholars of management practices.
Three steps are needed by the Society to support professionalism:
1. We must compile a body of organized knowledge that can be used to pass on to students and to guide existing practitioners to become better managers/administrators of accident-prevention planning, controlling, and organizing;
2. We must increase the knowledge of our members in general as to their responsibilities for promoting error-free performance in support of improved management and in support of the profession; and
3. We must form a strong professional society to support our dedication to the task of expanding and promoting the role of safety management as a tool for management improvement (not just keeping people out of the hospital) and as a functional force for achieving missions with a minimum of administrative over-sights.
Professional and professionalism are used quite liberally from time to time in order to describe certain qualities felt to be uniquely characteristic of a particular group of individuals and of their practices. Such groups should periodically analyze, the true meaning of profession and evaluate their status accordingly. The following statements are suggested for use as guidelines for these analyses:
1. Practice in the field is intended primarily to bring unique services to mankind rather than to assure gain to individuals who provide these services;
2. Competencies needed to provide the essential services of the field are developed largely through scholarly investigation and study of a rather unique body of time-tested knowledge;
3. Members of the field maintain continuing efforts to improve upon the related body of knowledge by contributing and freely sharing both restructured and additional content that is based upon research as well as real-life applications;
4. Standards of conduct among practitioners of the field are embodied within a code of ethics which is intended to serve and to guide members in their relations with clients and with one another; and
5. Organizations that are mutually accepted among members formulate and enforce minimum qualifications for entry into recognized practices through processes of accreditation, licensing, registration, and other means of regulation.
From the Journal of Safety Management, Vol. 6, No. 3, September 15, 1976, National Safety Management Society, pp. 1-2.
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