The 66 study firms produced a wide variety of machinery
including cranes and other lifting equipment, agricultural and
horticultural machinery, boilers and pressure vessels, industrial
cleaning systems, and machinery for processing, handling or
packaging food, timber, minerals and other products or waste
materials. In the course of designing, producing and supplying
their machinery into Australian and international markets, these
firms constructed knowledge about machinery safety matters, to
varying extents, through regulatory, specialist or everyday sources.
This section examines the different constituents of machinery
safety knowledge. It then identifies the factors that sustained
better performance for the substantive safety outcomes which
were critical for complying with the regulatory goal of prevention
(hazard recognition, risk control and safety information), or were
linked with poorer performance for these outcomes.