A Methodological Setting to Explore National Occupational Safety and Health Systems

The dichotomy between efficiency and effectiveness is ever timely. They are closely related to Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) management, but there is still little awareness. The literature has extensively covered the analysis of interventions for OSH improvement. The focus however is mostly on the efficiency of activities, but less concern is given to the real effectiveness of the processes. This implies that the network of actors developing the related activities is rarely discussed. This work starts analysing OSH actors’ roles and functions by dwelling on the national OSH systems of different European countries, where institutional effects strongly affect OSH practices. Common characteristics of national OSH systems have been identified as minimal requirements to make a national OSH system work properly. Data have been classified into a structured dataset and the resulted database makes available a huge amount of data on national OSH systems, which previously was very hard to retrieve in practice. Being an explorative study, further analyses and more accurate comparisons among countries will surely entail new opportunities for future policy and practice improvement.