Evaluating the impact of social-cultural values on technical risk management

This is an exploratory research aimed at identifying and evaluating social-cultural values and the impact such values could have on the technical risk management in oil refinery business of Kuwait. Generally, the management of risks in the oil refinery tends to be centred on the collection and simulation of technical data which can then be used to make decisions on the wellbeing of the workforce as well as the refinery installations. While the number crunching in the process is immensely vital, there tends to be a problem of ignoring if not sidelining the social cultural values of the people dealing with risk management processes. It could be presumed that trivialising people's values when setting the technical performance of oil and gas installations could be the starting point for poor integration and implementation of risk management strategies because the psychology of risk, as perceived by the locals. This research was conducted using an interview based survey to explore how the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) incorporates the social cultural dimension of risk management processes. Based on a stratified sample of 19 respondents the result indicates that there is an unusually low level of recognition of social-cultural values in the risk management process in the KPC. The research recommends a further research so as to gain a clear understanding of the drivers for such a scenario.