The Legitimacy of Safety Management Systems in the Minds of Norwegian Seafarers

All seafarers I have met are concerned with their own safety and all serious shipping companies, national regulatory authorities, unions and larger shipping clients work to improve safety at sea. Formalised risk management systems are at the heart of these efforts, and there is good reason to believe that they have been very successful. One would therefore expect that seafarers had a positive attitude and were committed to their implementation. Empirical data suggests the opposite. During observational fieldworks over the last two and a half years, on eight different ships in Norway, Australia and Malaysia, not one of the observed seafarers expressed mainly positive opinions about the safety management systems imposed on them. The great majority of seafarers whose opinions have been recorded expressed massive negative sentiments. Assuming a Weberian perspective this paper explores how the bureaucratic implementation of such risk management systems may contribute to this picture.