Participant observation can be an excellent way to gather qualitative data and observe real behaviours, provided the participant observer does not cause a behavioural change from the norm. Such a change in behaviour is known as the Hawthorne effectwhere people modify their behaviour when they know they are being watched or studied. The Hawthorne effect is one of the greatest challenges research observers face when gathering data and has long been described as the 'Achilles heel' of participant research (Coombs and Smith, 2003). This challenge is discussed based on experiences from gathering data on behavioural safety and attitudes on a very large civil engineering construction project currently underway in the UK. The proposed six-stage protocol helped the participant observer witness real behaviours and true attitudes of the workforce while limiting the potential negative consequences of the Hawthorne effect. A case study example using this protocol suggests that it is important that the researcher becomes successfully immersed in the social setting by gaining trust and making the workers feel relaxed and unthreatened. The paper also discusses other challenges associated with an ethnographic approach including validity, bias, interpreting evidence and analysing the data collected.
The health and safety (H&S) of workers is a critical project management goal in construction. As globalisation and migrant movement increases, construction projects are becoming more nationally diverse. Amongst multinational workforces, language barriers present an obvious but largely unresolved H&S communication challenge, with current strategies in use yet to be assessed. On a large construction project in the United Kingdom, H&S communication strategies were explored through an ethnographic approach. This paper contributes by revealing the impracticalities of using employees as interpreters in workgroups of six or more; the limitations of technologies in a dynamic construction site environment, and highlights the unresolved challenge of translating safety videos in multiple languages. Challenges arose including translators refusing to translate, as they were not receiving extra financial benefits and it was not recognised as part of their workload; and translators being given favourable treatment during disciplinary processes as they were crucial to the continued operation of the site team. This reveals the complexities involved in implementing effective H&S communication strategies on international and multinational projects, which have previously remained largely ignored.
Side-channel analysis has become a wellestablished topic in the scientific community and industry over the last one and a half decade. Somewhat surprisingly, the vast majority of work on sidechannel analysis has been restricted to the "use case" of attacking cryptographic implementations through the recovery of keys. In this contribution, we show how sidechannel analysis can be used for extracting code from embedded systems based on a CPU's electromagnetic emanation. There are many applications within and outside the security community where this is desirable. In cryptography, it can for example be used for recovering proprietary ciphers and security protocols. Another broad application field is general security and reverse engineering, e.g., for detecting IP violations of firmware or for debugging embedded systems when there is no debug interface or it is proprietary.A core feature of our approach is that we take localized electromagnetic measurements that are spatially distributed over the IC being analyzed. Given these multiple inputs, we model code extraction as a classification problem that we solve with supervised learning algorithms. We apply a variant of linear discriminant analysis to distinguish between the multiple classes. In contrast to previous approaches, which reported instruction recognition rates between 40-70%, our approach detects more than 95% of all instructions for test code, and close to 90% for real-world code. The methods are thus very relevant for use in practice. Our method performs dynamic code recognition, which has both advantages (only the program parts that are actually executed are observed) but also limitations (rare code executions are difficult to observe).
Purpose
The leadership style and communication practices of supervisors in the Australian construction industry were measured. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of leadership style and communication practices of Australian construction supervisors on workgroup health and safety (H&S) climate and behaviour.
Design/methodology/approach
A questionnaire was administered to members of 20 workgroups engaged in rail construction work on the Level Crossing Removal Project and the Melbourne Metro Tunnel Project in Victoria, Australia. The survey measured components of supervisors’ transformational and transactional leadership, communication practices, the group H&S climate and workers’ self-reported H&S compliance and participation.
Findings
Supervisors’ transformational and transactional leadership, as well as communication practices, were all positively and significantly correlated with group H&S climate and workers’ self-reported H&S behaviours. The transformational leadership component of providing an appropriate model was the strongest predictor of H&S participation, while H&S compliance was predicted by the transactional leadership component of providing contingent reward, as well as supervisors’ communication practices. H&S climate fully mediated the relationship between supervisory leadership and workers’ self-reported H&S behaviour.
Originality/value
The research demonstrates that both transformational and transactional supervisory leadership are important in the construction context. Effective communication between supervisors and workers is also important for H&S. The findings suggest that supervisory leadership development programmes may be an effective way to improve H&S performance in predominantly subcontracted construction workgroups.
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