The Development of Danish OHS Regulation - Organizational Understanding and Program Theory

This paper focuses on a major recent amendment of the Danish Working Environment regulation concerning the cooperation of health and safety between employees and employer. The amendment, which came into force in October 2010, consists of four elements: 1) change of terminology, 2) flexibility in organizing OHS, 3) link between the companies’ overall strategic management and OHS and 4) continuously competence development for the health and safety representatives. In this paper we present and analyze the individual elements of the legislative amendment. Subsequent we investigate the organizational understanding that underlies the amendment and we explore the program theory that the different elements of the reform subscribe to.