Academic aiming to save lives through publishing new series
Director of the Civil Safety and Security Unit (CSSU) at the Leicester School of Business Dr Simon Bennett has been appointed a Series Editor for Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. His series, titled: 'Systems Thinking for Safety' will migrate safety management techniques from commercial and military aviation to other domains, with a view to improving safety performance, and ultimately saving lives.
Peter Lang is an academic publisher specializing in the humanities and social sciences. It publishes a wide range of titles such as 'How Pilots Live' by Dr Bennett, monographs and edited collections.
Dr Bennett recently submitted an application to Peter Lang describing the rationale, aims and prospects for his series. He plans to publish up to two monographs per annum, the majority of which being single-authored. The first will be a general introduction to the principles and applications of systems-thinking in the field of safety. The application was considered by the publisher's Editorial Board, which offered him the series.
Dr Bennett said: “Although academic in orientation, the monographs in my series will be written in a way that makes them accessible to a general audience. In my opinion, a good deal of academia's output is arcane, and more or less irrelevant to ordinary people. My mission (and the mission of the CSSU) is to engage directly with the real world... and change it for the better. This is why I spend most of my time off-campus in the company of politicians, civil servants, business people, industrialists and workers.
“The aim is to embed a systems-thinking approach to safety in the public consciousness, and in the minds of movers and shakers, including politicians, civil servants, businesspeople, journalists, academics and students. The overarching aim is to save lives both in aviation and in other complex socio-technical systems, such as health-care, nuclear power generation, chemicals production, oil and gas extraction, deep mining, marine transportation and rail transportation.”