A safety-narrative is a deliberately constructed story or narrative frame used within an organization to communicate, interpret, and transmit safety-related meaning. It takes raw safety events — incidents, near-misses, hazard observations, compliance outcomes — and shapes them into a structured account that carries lessons, assigns significance, and influences subsequent behavior. Its parameters are: (1) a safety-relevant event or domain as content, (2) a narrative structure (characters, sequence, causality, moral or prescriptive lesson), (3) an organizational audience or community of practice, and (4) a purpose — learning, compliance, culture-building, or sense-making. It persists through explicit channels: post-incident reviews, safety briefings, training curricula, incident reports, and the informal story-telling that spreads through workplaces. The narrative is the construct — a human-made device for making safety intelligible and actionable. [formal: narratio safety | substrate: mind | horizon: generations | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]
Accepted ontology entry
safety-narrative
A safety-narrative is a deliberately constructed story or narrative frame used within an organization to communicate, interpret, and transmit safety-related meaning. It takes raw safety events — incidents, near-misses, hazard observations,…
Definition
Why it is in scope
A human-made communicative construct: the practice of framing safety-related information — incidents, near-misses, procedures, risks — as stories or narratives within an organization. Built to persist through organizational memory, training materials, safety briefings, and culture-shaping discourse.
Names and aliases
- safety-narrativeen · CANONICAL
Relations from this entry
- cmrg41t8500jl2a1np31jd9o0INSTANCE_OF →
which-came-first: narrative is more general and older than safety-narrative as a specialized concept. INSTANCE_OF per Law 9: safety-narrative IS a specific kind of narrative — one focused on safety content within organizational contexts. A competent speaker would call a safety-narrative 'a narrative'.
- cmsbnrm9m01hy3vv3hsaponoxSERVES →
Safety-narrative is maintained for the sake of safety-knowledge: it is the shared story an organization tells about safety, and its purpose is to propagate, reinforce, and culturally transmit safety understanding. Law 8d: the servant (narrative) points to the master (safety-knowledge as the thing being transmitted).
Relations to this entry
No accepted relations in this direction.
Record identity
- Created
- Aug 2, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC
- Content hash
- 84cb76a8335b4af744139faf18b8f308d5e4427bd3846f3966f8c3917229da4d