Eakin J M
Department of Behavioural Science, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Int J Health Serv. 1992;22(4):689-704. doi: 10.2190/DNV0-57VV-FJ7K-8KU5.
Small workplaces present particular challenges for the promotion of occupational health and safety. However, little is known about the social organization of work in such settings and how it relates to matters of health and safety. The research on which this article is based relates patterns of occupational health behavior to the nature of social relationships within the workplace. From a qualitative analysis of interviews with 53 small business owners, the author describes the most common approach to managing workplace health and safety: leaving it up to the workers. This posture is explained in terms of the owners' perception of risk, particularly their understanding of workplace hazards, and their assessment of the social costs of ignoring or addressing such issues. Owners tended to discount or normalize health hazards, and to believe that management intervention in employee health behavior was paternalistic and inconsistent with prevailing patterns of labor relations and norms respecting individual autonomy. Many owners understood health and safety not as a bureaucratic function of management but as a personal moral enterprise in which they did not have legitimate authority. The conceptualization of the owners' responses in terms of "social rationality" has implications for addressing problems of health and safety in small workplaces.
小型工作场所对促进职业健康与安全提出了特殊挑战。然而，对于此类场所的工作社会组织以及它与健康和安全问题的关系，我们知之甚少。本文所依据的研究将职业健康行为模式与工作场所内社会关系的性质联系起来。通过对53位小企业主的访谈进行定性分析，作者描述了管理工作场所健康与安全的最常见方法：将其交给工人。这种态度可以从业主对风险的认知，特别是他们对工作场所危害的理解，以及他们对忽视或解决此类问题的社会成本的评估方面来解释。业主往往低估健康危害或将其正常化，并认为管理层对员工健康行为的干预是家长式的，与现行劳动关系模式以及尊重个人自主权的规范不一致。许多业主并不将健康和安全视为管理的官僚职能，而是看作一项他们没有合法权威的个人道德事业。从“社会合理性”角度对业主反应的概念化，对于解决小型工作场所的健康和安全问题具有启示意义。
