A Hierarchy of Safety Responsibility and Ownership

The different levels of management found within the construction site context, and the different ways in which they implement and construct safety on sites create what can be termed a hierarchy of safety. Through the relationships that develop between the violators of the safety rules and those tasked with their enforcement at various levels of management, further considerations of how the responsibility for, and ownership of, safety works in practice can be explored. 

Unpacking the enforcement of site safety rules has suggested that both site supervisors and operatives simply accept violations as part of their daily work, and are also resigned to the punishment dealt out if the perpetrator is caught. However, this clearly shifts responsibility 

However, at the top of this hierarchy of safety, speaking as it does from a position of engagement through safety propaganda, the main contractor s corporate voice of safety seeks to challenge this shift in responsibility, and send it back down the management chain. As this text from an induction slide states that  

Nothing you do is so important that the time cannot be taken when conducting your works to do it safely 

But the corporate voice also requires some elements of safety enforcement at times, although this is often dressed in the clothes of safety propaganda, seeking to shift enforcement from the implementation of rules through punishment to the encouragement of individuals to follow the rules of their own volition. For example, a common way of positioning the site rules in corporate site safety guides is to ask that the operatives  

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