Social and organisationnal presuppositions for health and safety management systems implementation: an experiment into ten french firm

A study of the implementation of Occupational Safety and Health Management Systems (OSHMS) was carried out in ten French enterprises. The aim was to identify their characteristics of use in order to debate the advantages and the practical limitations of OSHMS, then to draw up recommendations. Two levels of results are presented: comparative examination and a typological classification of OSHMS. The analyses show that an OSHMS contributes to the structuring of the prevention actions. However, the domination of highly-Taylorian principles of actions leads to expressing reservations as to their real efficiency for prevention.