**Section 1**

**Health, Safety and the Environment** 

**1** 

**Current Trends and Future Developments in** 

Occupational safety and health (OHS) like all facets of business, needs to be properly managed. A company's OSH system helps ensure effective control of OHS risks and continual improvement in OHS performance, prevent work-related illness or injury and to

The goals of this chapter are 1) the identification of effective practices, processes and structures in OHS risk management, and 2) using a simple framework to draw together what is known of good and bad practice in this area, particularly in deciding what rules should be explicitly formulated and imposed. We argue that there is an urgent need for the formulation and implementation of a new management framework for occupational hazards; one that is appropriate for the new economic and occupational structure of work. The overall objective is 1) to underpin observations, 2) illustrate typical characteristics of the current situation and 3) indicate directions that could lead to solving these new safety problems. We suggest that this task should initially involve stepping back and revisiting the

In approaching the issue, the chapter, first, attempts to provide a succinct mapping of the environment of occupational risk, through a brief examination of its historical dimensions. Based on a thorough literature review, the major role of the ISO 31000:2009 standard is emphasized. Given that risk management is an adaptive process and that risk assessment is merely one of its features, the question is what can risk managers do to make their activities more credible and acceptable? A section is devoted to benchmarking organizational practice and risk treatments. This focus also raised the discussion of drawbacks and pitfalls of risk ranking methods. The chapter pays special attention to developing a new understanding of the participatory approach and closes with a comparative analysis which seek further explanation of approaches to occupational health and safety risk management based on two kinds of epistemological assumptions existing in the field, namely constructivism and positivism. This work should assist those practitioners, researchers and other stakeholders within industry who are interested in assessing and managing the existing OHS risks in their organisations,

frame of reference in which the protection against occupational injury is viewed.

with the intention of identifying the priority areas for focussing improvement effort.

**1. Introduction** 

achieve compliance with regulations and standards.

**Occupational Health and Safety** 

**Risk Management** 

Roland Iosif Moraru *University of Petroşani* 

*Romania* 
