Articlegreen2013

A model for occupational safety and health intervention diffusion to small businesses

Raymond C. Sinclair · Thomas R. Cunningham · Paul A. Schulte

81 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Journal of Industrial Medicine

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Occupational Health and Safety Research Occupational Health and Safety in Workplaces Occupational Health and Safety Management

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Smaller businesses differ from their larger counterparts in having higher rates of occupational injuries and illnesses and fewer resources for preventing those losses. Intervention models developed outside the United States have addressed the resource deficiency issue by incorporating intermediary organizations such as trade associations. METHODS: This paper extends previous models by using exchange theory and by borrowing from the diffusion of innovations model. It emphasizes that occupational safety and health (OSH) organizations must understand as much about intermediary organizations as they do about small businesses. OSH organizations ("initiators") must understand how to position interventions and information to intermediaries as added value to their relationships with small businesses. Examples from experiences in two midwestern states are used to illustrate relationships and types of analyses implied by the extended model. RESULTS: The study found that intermediary organizations were highly attuned to providing smaller businesses with what they want, including OSH services. The study also found that there are opinion leader organizations and individual champions within intermediaries who are key to decisions and actions about OSH programming. CONCLUSIONS: The model places more responsibility on both initiators and intermediaries to develop and market interventions that will be valued in the competitive small business environment where the resources required to adopt each new business activity could always be used in other ways. The model is a candidate for empirical validation, and it offers some encouragement that the issue of sustainable OSH assistance to small businesses might be addressed. Am. J. Ind. Med. 56:1442-1451, 2013. Published 2013. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.

References

2019Diffusion of Innovations 1 2003Diffusion of innovations 2005Social Exchange Theory: An Interdisciplinary Review 1998Smart Regulation 2010A service perspective on business relationships: The value creation, interaction and marketing interface 2002Occupational health and safety management in small size enterprises: an overview of the situation and avenues for intervention and research 1998Musculoskeletal, visual and psychosocial stress in VDU operators before and after multidisciplinary ergonomic interventions 2003Factors That Influence Safety Performance of Specialty Contractors

Cited by

2014Application of a model for delivering occupational safety and health to smaller businesses: Case studies from the US

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.