Safety culture in an aircraft maintenance organisation: A view from the inside

This article deals with a case study about the safety culture of an aircraft maintenance organisation. The case study provides ethnographic accounts based on participant observation, interviews and document analysis. Safety culture is specifically related to the development and growth phase of the organisation and explicitly relates safety culture to production interests. The analysis focuses on the various roles and the tensions between the quality assurance and maintenance management departments, and the way aircraft maintenance technicians (AMTs) in practice deal with tensions between safety and production interests. Theoretically this article stresses the value of a process view on organisational development for the analysis of safety culture and the paradoxical relationship between safety and economic interests. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd