Rethinking safety climate: safety as a situated, relational, and task-embedded practice

Safety climate surveys are widely used as leading indicators of occupational safety, yet they translate complex practice into standardised, reportable perceptions. This study examines how safety is understood and enacted in everyday work in the Swedish Armed Forces and clarifies why established safety climate measures, including NOSACQ-50, may misalign with operational safety realities. Drawing on the distinction between techne and episteme, the study conceptualises a translation gap between what can be codified and measured and what must be accomplished through situated judgement and coordination in real time. The material comprised 38 transcribed semi-structured interviews, ranging from 120 to 315 min and yielding 963 A4 pages, collected across units, staffs, headquarters, and exercises. Analysis used inductive qualitative content analysis at both manifest and latent levels. NOSACQ-50 dimensions were introduced only in later interpretive stages as sensitising concepts rather than a coding template. Four interrelated themes described safety as: (1) situated moral judgement under operational pressure; (2) negotiated through hierarchy, where voice is legitimacy-bound and silence may be adaptive; (3) sustained through relationships and informal coordination; and (4) constrained in learning by tempo and weak translation into formal systems. The findings suggest that item misfit may reflect a broader disconnect between formal safety representations and the practical conditions under which safety becomes speakable, documentable, and collectively learnable in high-risk hierarchical organisations. The study contributes a practice-sensitive explanation for why survey-based safety climate measures may weakly represent adaptive judgement, relational coordination, and legitimacy-bound escalation in military settings.