An assessment of aviation safety management system applications from the new institutional theory perspective

The focus of this study is the Safety Management System (SMS) applications that have been increasingly popular among aviation organizations in recent years. SMS is an administrative application that emerged to carry out aviation operations safely and quickly adopted at both national and international level. Many organizations operating in the aviation sector are observed to practice SMS and form SMS departments within their structure. The aim of this study is to determine the nature of the responses to this new application by the aviation organizations, whether there is uniformity in the organizational field, and whether the application is genuinely adopted and embraced. Qualitative research design is used in this study. Primary and secondary sources are used as the data collection method. The primary data of the study were collected by the researcher by using a semi-structured interview form with 13 questions and the notes from observations. The semi-structured interviews were conducted with the managers responsible for establishing and managing the Safety Management System in a total of 11 organizations in Turkey, comprising group-A licence holder ground-services organizations, catering companies operating as part of the ground services and terminal organizations. These managers were selected through purposive sampling method. In an effort to include all parties concerned, 1 SMS inspector from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, which is the regulatory authority of the aviation sector, was also interviewed in a semi-structured way. Inductive and deductive analysis methods were used in the analysis of the obtained qualitative data. The secondary data were obtained documents from the participating organizations and the researcher diary. The findings indicate that normative institutional pressures and the obligation to abide by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) regulations and legitimacy concerns are the underlying reasons for the increasing popularity of SMS applications, and the sector is dominated by a coercive isomorphism mechanism. As a response to such institutional pressure, of the aviation organizations included in the study, majority were found to follow avoid and conceal strategy and the remaining were found to follow an acquiesce and comply strategy. Finally, the study reveals that the majority of the organizations in the research field adopt SMS applications ceremonially.