The Development of an Organizational Safety Culture in the United States Forest Service

For over 100 years, the US Forest Service (USFS) has developed initiatives to improve safety outcomes. Herein we discuss the engineered solutions used from 1910 through 1994, when the agency relied on physical science to address the hazards of wildland fire suppression. We then interpret safety initiatives of the subsequent 25 years, as the USFS incorporated social science perspectives both into its understanding of emergency fire incidents and its mitigation of vulnerabilities across all fields of work. Tracing the safety programs using a historical sociology approach, we identify, within the agency’s narrative, three recent developments in its organizational safety culture: cultural awareness, cultural management, and cultural reorganization. This article describes how the development of top-down safety initiatives are questioned and shaped by employees who actively influence the trajectory of a safety culture in the USFS. Study Implications: Safety is a core value of the US Forest Service (USFS), and several safety initiatives, along with employee feedback over the years, have shaped the organizational culture of the agency. To build a robust and world-renowned safety culture in high-risk industries, managers require an understanding of the origins of their organization’s current safety culture. Using a critical social science analytical lens, we discuss how safety initiatives and the development of a safety culture position organizations such as the USFS to move away from reactionary safety initiatives and anchor to employee safety as a core value in order to absorb external shocks, such as rapidly changing ecosystems, development in the wildland urban interface, and larger and more intense wildfires.