RT Article
T1 The Crash of Cougar Flight 491: A Case Study of Offshore Safety and Corporate Social Responsibility
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 113
IS 3
SP 519
OP 541
A1 Hart, Susan M.
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2013
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1785647199
AB On March 12, 2009, a Sikorsky S-92A helicopter travelling to two offshore oil installations crashed into the sea about 55 km away from the coastal city of St. John’s in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), Canada. It sank quickly with the loss of 17 lives. There was one survivor. The article examines the circumstances of the crash to assess the effectiveness of an instrumental, business case for safety and, by extension, for corporate social responsibility (CSR). The article fills a gap in the business and the management literature by adopting a qualitative, case study methodology to complement earlier, predominantly quantitative research. The study analyzes a comprehensive set of documentary data available from the offshore regulator’s public inquiry website, including many days of verbatim testimony from the industry, the union, regulators, investigators, the lone survivor and families of the deceased, in addition to written submissions and expert reports. Investigatory reports from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada and the NL Inquiry were analyzed, as were regulatory documents and media coverage. Although offshore safety has improved since the Ocean Ranger disaster in 1982 (Wells http://www.cnlopb.nl.ca/ohsi_phase_one.shtml, 2010), the empirical evidence in this case study adds to our understanding of how reliance on a voluntary, instrumental business case for CSR in the absence of a normative concept of CSR is likely to fail, largely because of the existence of a powerful tension between oil exploration and production and investment in safety.
K1 Offshore oil safety
K1 Helicopter safety
K1 Corporate Social Responsibility
K1 Business case for safety
DO 10.1007/s10551-012-1320-8