Constructing Safety on Sites

So what has this unpacking of construction site safety achieved Can we now answer the simple questions posed in the introduction to this book  

Unpacking Construction Site Safely, First Edition. Dr Fred Sherratt. 

Safety is actually highly complex, and whilst that might sound like academic nonsense, it is arguable that this simple realisation alone is itself pretty helpful. 

If we sit back and just think about how complicated safety is -how it is different for different people, how it shifts and changes in its relationships with work, whether it is embedded with in practice or left to stand alone, or even pushed off to one side with all the other non-productive aspects of construction management, whether it has a fixed state or is far more intangible and shifting with time and space, whether it is linked more closely to management and control, engagement and enforcement, ownership and responsibility - we can start to get a better idea of how complicated its management should perhaps be. 

Safety isn t something that can necessarily be managed by tick-lists or generic inspection forms created by off-the-shelf safety management systems, indeed the ways we seek to measure and manage safety have been revealed within this book to be at times much less than helpful themselves. 

---

Although accidents are just one of the ways in which we construct safety on sites, they help create a shared acceptance of a reality in which accidents will happen. It is in this reality where safety improvements are sought. But this is not a context which readily supports a shift to a safer industry. Indeed, an inherent fatalism has often been identified within industrial workforces which can play havoc with organisational safety targets, particularly those around zero - currently the biggest number in construction site safety- and one which is explored in much more detail in Chapter 8. 

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. 

---