Safety culture co-creation in forest industry manufacturing mills – A systematic literature review and conceptual model

The forest industry has high accident and injury rates, and although research and practice recognize safety culture playing an important role in sustainable accident prevention, research about how safety culture is formed jointly is scattered among disciplines and knowledge traditions. Thus, this review adopts a co-creation lens to synthesize conflicts, agreements, and future research avenues of safety culture in the forest industry and comparable high-risk manufacturing and processing industries. To this extent, a descriptive statistical analysis of 60 articles and a systematic literature review of 25 articles were conducted and combined to develop a conceptual model. The descriptive statistical analysis shows a highly international field with few international and multidisciplinary collaborations. Quantitative methods and health and engineering fields are dominant, calling for more diverse research designs and increased international and interdisciplinary collaboration. The systematic literature review synthesizes the current research landscape, showing that safety culture is co-created in response to organizational, individual, contextual, and interventional factors. Additionally, it is shown that safety culture co-creation happens dynamically in horizontal and vertical directions in the organization, but also extends to external stakeholders. Thus, safety culture co-creation is no one-way street, but rather a dynamic and inclusive dialogue that happens vertically and horizontally within an organization, but also in relation to external factors and stakeholders. Training, communication, knowledge sharing, and collaboration are identified to be effective leverage points for practitioners to foster effective safety culture co-creation.