You may be wondering what the rule of law has to do with safety culture.  In the Model 1 Guide, the analogy of safety culture to physical fitness was useful in illustrating more tangible attributes that could be applied to safety culture such as natural decay.  In this article I found the concept of the rule of law to be an intriguing analogy to safety cutlure for a different reason.  It seems to me both represent "cultures".  In the case of the rule of law, a legal, moral and individual rights culture. Both seem to be pervasive characteristics of their environments, both seem to be intuitively familiar yet hard to define in concrete terms, and both seem to be advocated because they embody the "right" principles and values.  The fact that both types of cultures may also play important, but hard to quantify, roles in the performance of people (states, organizations) and creation of value (economic growth, high reliability nuclear operations) is something that may need greater emphasis.  In the case of safety culture, rather than seeing safety cutlure independent of (or even orthogonal) to business success, a better view might be to see it as intrinsic to success.

One other observation regards the difficulty of researchers to show a link between rule of law and short term economic outcomes such as growth.  Here I think we may be a bit ahead of the curve through our modeling of safety culture from a systems perspective.  Something this approach reveals is the importance of feedback loops that operate indirectly and may require substantial time to have an impact on current results.  We can all think of examples in the nuclear industry (Davis Besse?) where performance over a finite period of time looked quite good, but was concealing the very cultural defects that would eventually lead to a major performance issue (the untimely discovery of RPV head corrosion).  If the correlation of safety culture, or the rule of law, was direct and immediate, it would be much easier to measure and manage, and would exhibit short term results reliably.