Construction Safety: Economics and Informatics Perspectives

In this chapter, we conducted a survey on various stakeholders' perceptions of Social Exchange Theory, Perceived Organizational Support and Exchange's impact on construction safety. Many safety & environmental officers consider favourable job conditions the most crucial factor and then social rewards and morality. As per engineers, surveyors, and managers, group safety climate is the most critical sub-criteria in construction safety enhancement. Favourable job conditions ranked second. However, frontline workers considered leader-member exchange a critical factor different from safety officers & environmental officers. Engineers, surveyors and managers considered the essential criteria was perceived organisational support. The most crucial sub-criteria of “Front-line Workers” is group safety climate, followed by “Loyalty and Compliance of specific social goals”.

There is need to develop occupational health and safety drivers that would improve occupational health and safety performance management, for small-scale contractors. This need is also significant for project stakeholders such as government agencies, clients, professionals and financiers. According to studies, these stakeholders in Zambia devote less attention to have drivers and indicators for occupational health and safety performance. After a thorough review of literature on the drivers to improved occupational health and safety performance management, the Delphi study was adopted as a methodology to establish consensus of the drivers among professionals. A structured 10-point Likert scale of influence questionnaire was developed as a measuring instrument. The questionnaire was administered to professionals with adequate experience and knowledge on occupational health and safety performance management in the electricity industry. Findings indicated that management strategy, finance, employee involvement, hazard identification and management, training and promotion, actions for improvement, employee wellbeing and government provision of occupational health and safety services are crucial to achieving goals and objectives for efficient occupational health and safety performance management. The developed drivers were found to be workable, adaptable, and capable of improving health and safety performance management for small-scale contractors and stakeholders in Zambia.

The construction industry is one of the most accident-prone sectors in the world. The lack of strict adherence to guidelines and safety standards is one of the major contributing factors to safety hazards. Identifying safety risks before the start of construction is very crucial. This requires incorporating safety parameters into the design stages of the project. A rule-based safety checking model by integrating safety management with Building Information Modelling (BIM) will facilitate safety checking in the design stages. This chapter discusses how the safety regulations are converted to rulesets and integrated to BIM to identify safety risks involved in the scaffolding structures during the design stage of the project. The rule-based safety checking approach will evaluate the BIM model if regulations and specifications are followed as mentioned in the safety codes. The integration of safety management with BIM will enable communicating safety issues with the stakeholders and reduce accidents relating to improper scaffoldings.

Unsafe behaviour and a lack of safety awareness are critical factors that cause accidents. This study reviewed journal papers on safety awareness in various industries, food, passengers, laboratories, and patients. Among the few databases, Web of Science and Scopus recorded the most articles, followed by Emerald, Science Direct, Taylor & Francis, Oxford, and Cambridge. The geographical distribution of journal publications about safety awareness was also investigated in this book chapter. Most articles, according to the findings, were produced in China. The US and the UK shared second place, followed by Korea and Australia. Most individuals claimed that safety education and training were crucial elements that affected safety awareness. This study offered suggestions to safety officers when they design and implement safety plans. It also offered hints to researchers who would like to research this area.

Due to the absence of the original building plan, low foreseeability and work environment uncertainty, workers do not have time to read building structure documents and specific work requirements and underestimate the complexity of the work; working for a refurbishment project is not safer than that for a new building. This study reviewed the construction accidents court cases in refurbishment and demolition work in Hong Kong from 1990 to 2019 in the legal databases Westlaw Asia and LexisHK. It found that some victims preferred to take risks, indicating low hazard awareness, while others were ignorant and did not know the causes of the accidents even after their injuries. Furthermore, many employers’ hazard awareness is low because they do not aware of hazardous areas. Some supervisors did not instruct their employees to use the protective equipment even though it is provided. As we may some construction sites have already utilised robots with weak artificial intelligence, this article raised a futuristic question regarding the hazard awareness responsibility of autonomous robots with strong artificial intelligence.

The research was intended to, identify the possible hazards, preventive and control measures implemented and assess their effectiveness at work place. Kaligandaki Transmission corridor project was selected for the study. The Kaligandaki transmission corridor projects extend from Mygdi to Nawolparasi with construction of three substations at Dana, Kushma and Nawolparasi. The research was carried out by utilizing the data collected from the experience and knowledge of KII experts, local people and researchers field observations along with by asking the duly semi structured questionnaire with client, consultant, contractor's managers, officers, engineers and the workers. It was identified that mechanical and fall hazards were the most prevailing hazards during construction. Exposures hazards, biological hazards, chemical hazards and psychological hazards were also found at work place. The major cause of accidents was the lack of knowledge and skill along with carelessness of the workers. Other activities like scaffolding works, deep excavation, material transportation, lifting and assembling of towers parts were also found as the equally risky activities during the construction of transmission line. It was responded that the major health problem faced by the workers due to physical hazards was the back pain and wrist pain. Similarly due to chemical hazards most of the workers responded allergic as the main health problem they faced during construction. So the management commitment towards motivation, health and safety along with workers participation are essential for the success of the project. Prevention and control measures have to be plan as per the level of risk.

The construction industry is characterised by institutionalised masculinity which is destructive to not only women’s participation and progression for a career but also men’s safety, health and wellbeing. Deliberate institutional initiatives of increasing women’s participation in construction effect a social engineering process to tackle this issue, which is disruptive to the long-standing organisational routines in construction projects. This chapter presents a review of recent institutional initiatives of increasing women’s participation in the industry and examine their impact on the functionality of construction project organisations. The relevant institutional interventions and research were selected for an institutional analysis through a snowball sampling approach, starting from a recent Australian initiative to increase women’s participation in trades. Five institutional logics are identified that are driving and legitimating the gender equality agenda: the masculinity logic, the market logic, the feminism logic, the humanity logic and the femininity logic. The review starts from a focus on ‘women’ and ends with a focus on ‘femininity’. Key findings are: (1) Feminism in the current practice presumes a gender contradiction which mirrors the masculinity logic. (2) Professionalism, the logic of the work, is missing from the current gender equality discourses. (3) A distinction is drawn between the ideology of feminism and the general trait of femininity. (4) Complexity within feminism needs further study. The results suggest to foster the femininity logic through ungendered job roles and a caring, engaging and nurturing on-job practice, illustrated with three examples. The results suggest that the equality agenda move beyond gender politics to anchor itself in professionalism, embrace the femininity values more substantially in job design and appraisal that reward teamwork  to engender a cultural change in the industry.

To understand the global research status in construction hazard awareness, this research studied articles indexed on the Web of Science by using the keywords “construction hazard awareness”, “real estate hazard”, “hazard recognition”, and “urban renewal hazard”. There were 2182 articles indexed on the Web of Science from 2011 to 2021. The US recorded the most considerable research on this topic. It published 530 articles with 11,149 citations, which is higher than other countries as double or more. Also, the US accounts for 24.3% of all the articles. China ranked second with 270 articles (12.37%), Italy ranked third (126 articles accounted for 5.77%). Other active countries in this area included the UK, Australia, and Germany. Regarding the highest citations institutions, the University of Pittsburgh recorded the highest citations (1143 times).

In the recent times, there has been a growing concern to improve safety management practices in the construction sector. In this regard, there is a need to improve “safety culture” as it plays a significant role in improving workplace safety conditions and is viewed as a comprehensive construct having possibilities of interventions at all levels of construction projects. However, the growing body of knowledge on safety culture research makes it difficult to have a systematic and comprehensive view of the subject. Towards addressing this issue, there is a need to systematize this body of knowledge with a comprehensive systematic literature review. The review is based on three-step methodology. First step aims at gathering suitable articles related to safety culture in construction sector. The second step presents the results of descriptive analysis on recent trends in safety culture research. Last step focuses on a detailed systematic review pertaining to definition, factors, and assessment tools that influence the level of safety culture practices. Results of this review help to uncover and provide a comprehensive overview of recent trends and advances governing safety culture research, and it can help academicians and practitioners identify fundamental influence from these published articles. Implications of the study emphasized that the study outcomes can assist researchers and practitioners to have consensus on industry-specific standards. Furthermore, this systematic literature review has helped to conceptualize safety culture, thereby highlighting the impact of external events and stakeholders interests in construction sector.

This chapter explores the potential of Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework as an actionable theory in guiding safety capability development for Integrated Project Delivery (IPD). It does so through the dynamic formation of action situations that incentivize and nurture the desirable capabilities for collaborative practice.  A worked example is presented to illustrate how the IAD framework works for this purpose. Following an in-depth review on IPD and safety literature, which defined a set of safety capabilities for IPD practice, the system designer set up initial IPD-oriented game rules which incentivized actors’ experiences that nurture such capabilities. The  reflective analysis results highlight three key perspectives in mobilising the IAD framework for safety capabilities development: (1) an organic power division between top-down design and bottom-up development of institutions; (2) an inclusive project front-end that involves actors in problem-framing activities; and (3) capabilities development as a process of shifting logics. Practically, the results inform effective training and coaching of practitioners at the teambuilding stage of IPD projects to configure safety as an integral attribute of the project system. Theoretically, the research contributes to the development of institutional theories in the project management context.