Just culture as dialogical learning: theoretical foundations and practical implications of restorative justice

Just culture is a recent perspective on responding to accidents or incidents in organisations. It refers to the importance of doing justice to the situation and the people involved, aimed at strengthening safety in the workplace and preventing future harm. There are two main conceptualisations of just culture, implying different views on justice, namely retributive and restorative justice. The concept of retributive justice emphasises individual responsibility for failures and the enforcement of given norms about right vs wrong via sanctions and punishment. Restorative justice emphasises the systemic and cultural dimension of accidents or incidents and aims to foster learning conditions for groups as well as the organisation involved. Elaborating on the theoretical presuppositions of the concept is important, both for theorising about just culture and for fostering just culture in practice. We extend the literature by looking into two approaches in contemporary philosophy and ethics that can deepen our understanding of what a restorative approach to just culture entails and how to foster it in practice: dialogical hermeneutics and care ethics. We show that dialogical hermeneutics and care ethics enable us to specify repair as a relational practice, understanding as an interpretation of the situation and identification of needs and moral learning as dialogical and democratic processes of joint reflection. By providing a concrete example of fostering restorative justice in a healthcare organisation, we demonstrate how the theoretical characteristics of a restorative justice inspired by dialogical hermeneutics and care ethics can be translated into practical processes of organisational moral learning.