Institutions and institutional logics in construction safety management: the case of climatic heat stress

Abstract

We employed a Glaserian grounded theory approach to explore the gap between behavioural safety and its unsatisfactory outcomes. Data were collected through ethnographic studies on the practice of managing heat stress on thirty-six construction sites in Hong Kong and Chonqing in mainland China. Two core concepts, institutions and institutional logics, are generated and defined to explain why safety rules do not necessarily produce safety behaviours. At society level, we explicated two pairs of institutional logics: the religion logics (Confucianism vs. pragmatism) and the market logics (rational market vs. individualism). At project organisational level, two logics of processing safety in production are explicated: a protection logic in the Chongqing context and a production logic in the Hong Kong context. The concepts and sub-concepts are compared to existing business literature for clarification of scopes. Empirical findings of the study suggest safety intervention needs to redirect its focus from promoting safety alone to addressing the institutional logics of the entire organisation and its societal context practised by multiple levels of actors. We conclude that safety research would benefit from redirecting its focus of analysis from discourses, interviews or surveys to authenticated cases reconstructed through triangulation of actors' discourses at multiple levels of an organisation, third-party observation, physiological data and objective measurement of the work environment. Methodologically, this paper provides a detailed guidance for conducting grounded theory research with a focus of conceptualisation.

Developing safety cooperation in construction: between facilitating independence and tightening the grip

“…privileged or standalone knowledge); it is rather a doing, an integrated attribute of everybody's practice on site. However, this perspective does not adequately address the professionalized safety-specific practice, in which safety in some senses is something in itself (Jia et al 2017). Therefore, in order to be able to distinguish between the differences of opinion, with regard to how safety is achieved, we also draw on an understanding of safety as positioned and essentially powered (Antonsen 2009, Hale andBorys 2013a).…”

“…Safety culture, however, has also been criticized for essentially being a management tool aimed at diffusing management values under the guise of the "right" safety culture (Antonsen 2009). These discourses cover many aspects of safety management, but they have also been shown to work against the intentions of creating safer construction sites and lowering incident rates (Jia et al 2017, Provan et al 2019.…”

“…The reason seems to be that safety rules and regulations foster accountability to the rules, instead of safety itself (Jia et al 2017, p. 350). Thus, safety becomes decoupled from the daily meaningful handling of tasks and challenges (Gherardi et al 1998, Gherardi and Nicolini 2002, Ozmec et al 2015, Jia et al 2017. This can seem paradoxical, as the involvement of workers in organizational learning processes is generally acknowledged as central when it comes to improving safety performance (Lund and Aarø 2004, DeJoy 2005, Kines et al 2013, Grill et al 2017, Bell 2018.…”

Safety first? Production pressures and the implications on safety and health

“…To Conclude: Alternative Thinking and a Call for Research I finish with a useful glimpse of how a utopian future for safety and production might be realised. Jia et al (2017) considered this concept whereby two institutional logics were identified, at a project organisation level, through ethnographic observation: a protection logic and a production logic. In the former, workers "intrinsically protect their personal interest by staying safe as much as they can" and in turn, if employers demonstrate their positive attitude to safety then they concluded that workers are more likely to be motivated and increase productivity.…”

Looking out to look in: inspiration from social sciences for construction management research

“…industrialized building processes. Both these studies, and the work by Jia et al (2017) and Gluch and Svensson (2017), show the importance of studying multiple levels in order to grasp the full complexity of managerial processes in construction. The concept of sensemaking has been picked up several times in recent CMR contributions, for example by Fellows and Liu (2016) in relation to cultural differences in project environments and by Kreiner (2006) and Volker (2012) in the context of architect selection processes.…”