Any manufacturing company, any service industry, they are all the same. 99.999% of all managers are trained to defer costs. That means minimal maintenance, even at the cost of safety. They will never implement accident prevention if those measures cost more than potential lawsuits, and in the case of manned space that is almost guaranteed to be the case. The classic example is the Ford Pinto, whose fuel tank had a tendancy to rupture and burn the car to a cinder following a rear collision. The safety upgrades for each car to prevent such a tragedy were about $15. But the company argued that if such measures were implemented on thousands upon thousands of production units that the costs were too much. Compared to what? They simultaneously estimated the cost of human life in terms of lost productivity in dollars (it amounted to about $200,000), multiplied it by the expected number of lives to be taken by the faulty fuel tanks, and subtracted the result from the upgrades costs. The upgrade costs were larger. The result is that the upgrades were never implemented.

One might suggest that this argues strongly against privately-owned manned spaceflight companies, but it is also possible that the inherent capitalist mentality that generates this behaviour is still present in non-profit organisations like NASA. One might also suggest that the culture you are referring to is not NASA culture alone, but the more diffuse culture of business in any country with a competitive economy. It is the culture of survival, however contradictory that may seem.