Decoupled implementation? Incident reporting in Chinese shipping

Conghua Xue, Lijun Tang and David Walters
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Conghua Xue: Department of Humanities and Arts, Nantong Shipping College, China
Lijun Tang: School of Business, Plymouth University, UK
David Walters: Work Environment Research Centre, Cardiff University, UK

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2021, vol. 42, issue 1, 179-197

Abstract: The occupational health and safety record is relatively poor in shipping and under-reporting of incidents is a concern in the industry. Much previous research investigated why workers did not report; this article shifts the focus to examine whether management genuinely welcomes safety-related reports in the context of Chinese chemical shipping. It reveals a functional decoupling between policy and practice related to incident reporting despite external monitoring. While companies had policies and procedures to encourage reporting, in practice the management associated seafarer competence with the number of problems reported and discouraged the crew from reporting problems which would be difficult or costly to solve. The findings suggest that to address the issue of under-reporting, it is more appropriate to deal with the problem of decoupling than to focus on changing crew’s behaviour.

Keywords: Chinese chemical shipping; decoupling and interaction; incident reporting; International Safety Management Code; occupational health and safety management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:42:y:2021:i:1:p:179-197

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X18758175

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