Anyway, of course I would like to join you…I will pass on anything I find that fits your goal..Did you read the Rasmussen paper in IGLC 10 by Howell et al?
Go to:
http://www.cpgec.ufrgs.br/norie/iglc10/

Regards,

Tariq

There are books on construction safety by both academics and practitioners. Every single book of the 6 I have read is primarily driven by OSHA rules and compliance procedures. Some do take the time to explain the science and research behind some of the safety rules. I am not saying this as a criticism but rather as a fact.

If you are looking for current state of construction safety or new thinking about safety, I think you are better off reading papers.

Can you tell me more about what you are looking for?

Regards,

Tariq

I’m looking for the best of the conventional wisdom. I’m trying to get a handle on the commonsense that drives the existing practices. My larger aim is to reconstruct theory and practice. I’m giving myself the year to do it. Want to join in?

I’ve been involved with some very effective safety leadership programs. As far as reading material goes, some of the safety trade magazines would be a good place to find bibliographies.

What has intrigued me is the behavioral focus now predominant. I have observed risk taking activies that, when analyized for root cause, were truly the outcome of complex behaviors.

I have found that risk versus reward behaviors are a large part of safety incidents. Safety incidents are the outcomes of the total of the risks taken times their probability. The reward is either achieving the project deliverable, or, and perhaps these result in the most deadly outcomes, the reward is recognition or advancement within the organizational unit.

Refer to Stanley Milgram’s experiment about authority, and you can see that organizational politics can result in some weird behavior. http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm is one summary review.

I think that Lean Construction produced safer projects because it alters the demand for risk; it places the rewards (project objectives) in a more achievable setting.

Thanks for your comments. The behaviorist view is pervasive not just in safety but also in general society. We’ve come to think that people do things for a reason — a payoff — when they might just be doing. One of my interests in the literature is to get at some of that.

Very little progress, if any, has been made in the last 12 years. Accident and mortality rates are virtually unchanged. Yet, we keep doing the same things we did 12 years ago. Like the project world in general, I expect a major rethink is required to produce a breakthrough in performance. I’m giving myself one year for that.

Until Lean is adopted and responsibilty is moved to the individual worker to perform and also stay safe, we will continue to have injuries. But of course OSHA would never trust an individual’s well-being to the individual.

gary