UK construction site safety: discourses of enforcement and engagement

Fred Sherratt, Peter Farrell and Rod Noble

Construction Management and Economics, 2013, vol. 31, issue 6, 623-635

Abstract: Developments in safety management on large UK construction sites have seen a paradigm shift from enforcement-based systems to safety-culture programmes, which seek to engage with the workforce to create fully cooperative and safety-conscious sites. Founded in social constructionism, recent research sought out the master discourses of safety on large UK construction sites through the examination of safety signage, talk around safety and safety documentation. Two of the most prominent discourses of safety on sites were found to be safety as enforcement and safety as engagement, reflecting the change in safety management strategies. These discourses were found to be interrelated in their constructions of safety, yet also varied in their associations with practice, responsibility, social interactions and the management hierarchy of the sites. These findings develop the current understanding of safety found on sites, with relation to the hierarchical structures of safety management and the discourses of enforcement and engagement in practice. The findings have significance for the safety practices of large UK contractors in developing and improving their safety-culture programmes, as well as suggesting potential new directions in the academic research of safety in construction.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01446193.2012.747689 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:conmgt:v:31:y:2013:i:6:p:623-635

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCME20

DOI: 10.1080/01446193.2012.747689

Access Statistics for this article

Construction Management and Economics is currently edited by Will Hughes

More articles in Construction Management and Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().