Safety Theater

How is it possible that the desire for a perfectly safe world with perfectly safe workplaces helps generate the opposite? Safety Theater shows how our desire for perfection drives compliance clutter, inauthentic relationships with work-as-done, and new kinds of accidents. Written by the leading global voice on safety innovation today, Safety Theater takes us back to the Enlightenment and its aspiration toward a perfectible world through rationality and science, and explains how, by separating severity from injury rates two centuries later, we now hit our targets but miss the point. This hopeful, forward-looking book is the final volume in a three-part series on the effects of 'neoliberalism,' which promotes the role of the private sector in the economy. Showcasing a more caring kind of capitalism—where free markets are free in a frame; where horizontal coordination replaces hierarchical control; where shareholders are not the only stakeholders; and where value and prosperity are