Safety compliance in a highly regulated environment: A case study of workers´knowledge of rules and procedures within the petroleum industry

​Violations of rules and procedures are commonly identified as an important causal factor in workplace accidents. The vast majority of previous research has been concerned with intentional rather than unintentional violations. This implies that researchers have put a particular focus on the aspects of work that affect workers’ safety motivation and their attitudes towards compliant behavior, and that they have been less concerned with the factors that affect workers’ knowledge of rules and procedures. On the basis of semi-structured interviews of 24 contract workers within the Norwegian petroleum industry, this research gap is addressed in the present paper.