Safety or Profit? ― International Studies in Governance, Change and the Work Environment

A review of developments in the governance of occupational health and safety (OHS) in Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and more generally; examines economic restructuring, precarious work, and gender issues; new governance theory, decriminalization of OHS, and the neoliberal agenda; and the continued failure to pursue evidence-based policy.

Theo Nichols is Distinguished Research Professor at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, UK, and an associate researcher at the Cardiff Work Environment Research Centre (CWERC). He has written widely on a variety of subjects in the general field of economic sociology—including class relations, management, and productivity—and has a special interest in labor relations in Turkey and China. He was one of the first sociologists in the UK to research health and safety at work, a field to which he has returned at various times since the publication, with Peter Armstrong, of Safety or Profit? in 1973.David Walters is professor of Work Environment and Director of the Cardiff Work Environment Research Centre (CWERC), a Cardiff University research center in the School of Social Sciences. His research and writing is on various aspects of the work environment, and he has particular interests in employee representation and consultation in healthy and safety, the politics of health and safety at work, regulating health and safety management, chemical risk management at work, and health and safety in small firms. His recent publications include Regulating Workplace Risks: A Comparative Study of Inspection Regimes in Times of Change (2011), Workplace Health and Safety: International Perspectives on Worker Representation (2009), and Within Reach? Managing Chemical Risks in Small Enterprises (2008). He is the editor of the international journal Policy and Practice in Health and Safety, is a member of the IOSH Research Committee, and has advised several state inquiries on health and safety.