Construction-site safety

There are two main SHE concerns in this phase. One is to ensure that the platform itself has a satisfactory quality with respect to safety, health and environment. A second concern is to ensure that the construction work is carried out in a safe way. We will here focus on this latter aspect. It is in Norskoil s interests to avoid accidents during construction that  

bad safety statistics are regarded as a sign of sloppy management control at the site on the part of the construction contractor. Sloppy management of this type will also manifest itself in bad quality and delays (Grimaldi, 1970 Levitt and Samelson, 1993 Kjellen etal., 1997). 

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Rather than discussing the implementation of various regulations or seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of safety management systems against templates of best practice, it considers how people think about safety, what it means to them and how they go on to collectively use those ideas in their everyday work. This could also be deemed an evaluation of construction site safety culture, a notoriously problematic term and one that is discussed in more... 

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

Although the last question has already been partly answered for us by the fact that we keep appearing in the list of the UK s most dangerous industries, it, and these other questions, will be explored as construction site safety is unpacked within this book. 

What justifications or excuses do they make These are the ways in which language is used to construct different realities and worlds, the set of meanings, metaphors, representations. .. that in some way together produce a particular version of events (Burr 2003 64), in this case construction site safety. 

Choudhry, R.M. and Fang, D. (2008) Why operatives engage in unsafe work behaviour investigating factors on construction sites. Safety Science, 46(4), 566-84. 

Cipolla, D., Sheahan, V.L., Biggs, H. and Dingsdag, D. (2006) Using Safety Culture to Overcome Market Force Influence on Construction Site Safety [Online]. Available http //eprints.qut.edu.aU/3801/1/3801.pdf [20 September 2015]. 

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. 

But these different constructions of safety are also readily able to demonstrate that there are distinct and different understandings of safety to be found within the site environment. Indeed both can be enacted by the workforce at the same time - such is the nature of our social world and therefore the realities of our construction sites. Safety is either its own entity, separate from the individual in both action and responsibility, or it becomes an inherent part of social interaction, bound up with people and practice in terms of their own actions and responsibilities. And people often draw on either or both of these two different constructs within their interactions, even shifting between them within a single conversation safety becomes an entity in some contexts, yet inherent within practice in others. 

Sherratt, R, Farrell, P. and Noble, R. (2013) Construction site safety discourses of enforcement and engagement. Construction Management and Economics, 31 (6), 623-35. 

Yet despite this, zero has become the biggest number in construction site safety. 

Although seemingly simple in its goals and intentions, the use of zero within construction site safety may not be so straightforward when considered from a constructionist perspective, and placed with the inconsistent, incoherent and ever changing realities of construction site life. Indeed, how zero manifests on sites, and how it is associated with safety, has the potential to influence its... 

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

However, throughout the process of unpacking construction site safety, some fundamental suggestions for change have emerged. 

The idea that first inspired this project was very simple -1 was going to find out why people still had accidents on large construction sites, despite there being lots of management efforts made to prevent this, and I was going to sort this out by working out how to develop a positive construction site safety culture. 

CITB GE700 (2004). Construction site safety - Health, Safety and Environmental Information 2004, CITB, June. 

Kines, R, Andersen, L.P.S., Spangenberg, S., Mikkelsen, K.L., Dyreborg, J. and Zohar, D. 2010. Improving construction site safety through leader-based verbal safety communication. Journal of Safety Research, 41(5), 399-406. 

Good construction site safety not only protects your company s assets, it also protects you, your... 

Start today to make a difference at your worksite. Good construction site safety and security not... 

Lingard H and S Rowlinson (1994) Construction site safety in Hong Kong. Construction Management and Economics, vol 12 pp 501-510. 

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