An Overview of Traditional Approaches towards Workplace Safety in High-Risk Industries

The traditional attitudes toward workplace safety and the common risk analysis methods alone cannot be effective in high-risk industries that are accompanied by socio-technical complexity and high vulnerability since they cause costs and damages in the system. The present study aimed to examine the strengths and weaknesses of traditional safety attitudes in workplaces of high-risk industries.

This study searched the foreign databases of Pubmed, Web of Sciences, Scopus, and Google Scholar, as well as Persian web databases, such as SID, Civilica, and Magiran up to 2020. The keywords used for this search included the term "Tradition" and the keywords of "Safety, Workplace, Risk, Industry, and Accident". A total of 53 articles were extracted. After screening the articles in terms of content and subject matter and deleting irrelevant articles, the full texts of 28 related articles were examined in more detail.

In the traditional approach to workplace safety, issues, such as human error and unsafe practices, defects in system components, and inadequate staff training were identified as the root causes of accidents. However, today, many studies have emphasized that the causes of accidents, especially in high-risk industries, should be explored in technological, organizational, and human factors (variability of daily tasks), as well as the combination of a set of emerging events.

Weaknesses to detect hidden and/or emerging risks, inadequate effectiveness in dealing with technical complexities-work processes, lack of understanding of nonlinear interactions, and the certainty of causes of the accident include the limitations of the traditional approach to workplace safety in high-risk industries