A Spanish subcontractor in a UK culture

Globalisation of the construction industry has meant that people from different national cultures often work together. This creates many additional challenges for the industry, one of which is forming and maintaining a positive safety culture. This study focuses on a Spanish subcontractor working in the UK on a large construction project (+£500m). Throughout a 9-month period, an ethnographic study was undertaken to explore the safety-related challenges that were created for the principal contractor; the lead researcher was able to spend time on the project as a participant observer to gather data around this phenomenon. Despite some regarding it as suspicious, ethnography has now emerged as another approach for understanding the construction industry. This paper demonstrates that through this qualitative approach, new avenues can be explored to broaden and improve our understanding of the industry. The Spanish subcontractor had a faster but less safe culture than their UK counterparts and found it difficult to change their ways and comply with stricter regulations. During the study period, the Spanish subcontractor was stopped numerous times for safety reasons, and even temporarily removed from site. These failings led to the appointment of a health and safety advisor which did lead to some improvements. The challenges did not only occur when the Spanish subcontractor was not following regulations or revealing a poor safety culture, but also when they appeared to display competence. Under UK legislation, the principle contractor is required to check and monitor the competence of the subcontractor and their systems. However in one scenario the principal contractor did not know anything about the Spanish system the subcontractor were using, so how would it be possible to monitor competence? Findings suggest that whilst the Spanish subcontractor may have been a low-cost option initially, safety risks were increased leading to significant amounts of time, money and resources being required to attempt to control these risks

Exploring factors affecting unsafe behaviours in construction

Why do workers take a chance and work from height without any safety protection? Is it because of their age, inexperience or lack of training? Is it to do with their risk perception or desire for risk taking and thrill seeking? Is it bad management style, poor safety culture or a substandard design? Does this happen everywhere around the globe or is it just one particular culture? To help us understand why there are different behavioural responses to hazards (e.g. working at height) in construction, we must first understand the factors that have affected that individual’s decision-making. This paper presents early investigations taking place on a £1.6B project in the UK involving construction workers from many different backgrounds and nationalities. Through a process of literature exploration, a safety climate survey and focus group discussions, factors have been identified and explored to consider how they impact behaviours. The results suggest that time pressure, training, experience, risk perception, safety culture, culture and management are the factors most likely to be influencing behavioural responses of individuals. Time pressure is perhaps the most important factor as it was often regarded as having the greatest influence by the focus group. Survey results revealed 31% of 475 participants thought that alcohol and drugs were 'always' a factor in accidents, and hence this factor has somewhat surprisingly been identified as having a fairly significant influence. These factors will be further explored in future work using an ethnographic approach, which will yield significant insight from fine-grained, observational analysis on the project

The antecedents and development of unsafety

The concepts of unsafe acts and unsafe conditions within incident and accident reporting processes are well established, and both play a part in safety, as seen in highly complex accident-causation models. Nevertheless, a systematic understanding of the development of unsafety to its manifestation as incidents is yet to emerge. Drawing on a large data set of nearly 4000 safety observation reports from a large infrastructure construction project, investigation of the way in which incidents are categorised is explored, and then, through content analysis of a purposive sample of individual reports, the reality of how the acts and conditions develop, combine and interrelate is evaluated. The findings reveal significant inconsistency in the application of the categorisations of ‘act’ or ‘condition’ and the utilisation of the process in apportioning individual blame through ‘unsafe acts’. It can be suggested that, within a construction context, there are relatively few precursors that produce unsafe acts or conditions, and focusing on these in practice would provide greater insights, enhancing utility without adding significant complexity. Further understanding of how the development of unsafety takes place would enable management to use reporting data, such as safety observation reports, better in the development and implementation of focused interventions

Doing the 'funky chicken' to communicate on multinational projects

An influx of migrant workers to the UK in recent times has meant the construction industry has had to adapt to nationally diverse workforces. In previous studies migrant workers have been highlighted as higher risk, and in 2007 the 25% rise in UK construction fatalities was attributed to communication issues and poor working practices. This study used an ethnographic approach to explore challenges created by a nationally diverse workforce on a large civil engineering project (+£500m), with particular focus on communication issues. Communication barriers meant that safety inductions took longer and bilingual workers were distracted from their work to translate. There were times when no translators/interpreters were present, and to overcome communication barriers a 'funky chicken dance' was used; or in other words, communication through noise and many body and hand movements. The funky chicken dance was sometimes successful in communicating to workers but was far from ideal. National diversity also meant that different ways of working was perceived as acceptable, which led to 'holes' in the procedures and tensions between employees. This study found: that confusion and debate surrounding safe working practices led to errors and confrontation; that safety risks were increased due to the challenges associated with communicating health and safety messages; there was significant reliance on interpreters and no simple way to check H&S messages were being communicated through them; the policy of one worker and interpreter to every six was inflexible and far from ideal; that there was greater difficulty in assessing levels of competency and there was a high turnover of foreign workers

Pulsar polarization: a partial-coherence model

The population of radio pulsars is observed to demonstrate certain polarization properties not explained by the conventional picture of pulsar polarization, namely frequency evolution of polarization, deviations of the linear polarization angle from a curve of geometric origins and the presence of features in the circular polarization. We present the partial-coherence model as a way to explain the co-occurrence of these features and to provide an origin for circular polarization in radio pulsar profiles. We describe the mathematics of the model and demonstrate how it can explain these observed features, both on a population level and for the idiosyncrasies of individual pulsars. The partial coherence model can account for complex polarization behaviour, enabling improved access to information about pulsar geometries. We discuss the scientific implications of this for our understanding of pulsar radio emission and propagation.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure

Exploring Safety Management Challenges for Multi-National Construction Workforces: A UK Case Study

Large construction projects frequently operate with multi-national workforces, utilizing migrant workers to provide both skilled and unskilled labour. Multi-national workforces are also brought together through joint ventures, as companies from different countries collaborate and share their expertise to construct large and complex construction projects. A multi-national joint venture in the UK provides the case study for an examination of the safety management challenges found on such projects. Whilst language and communication issues amongst workers are typically primary concerns, here they have not been prioritized. Instead, findings are presented that illuminate more nuanced and unquantifiable problems that faced the safety management team. An ethnographically informed approach was mobilized, with the lead researcher spending three years on the site with the safety team gathering data. Analysis revealed several challenges: problems with non-UK company compliance with UK legislation and standards; differences in working practices amongst both non-UK workers and their managers; differences associated with national cultures; and problems of poor worker welfare. It is suggested that awareness of these challenges should inform both the way in which such projects are initially contracted, as well as the development of more sophisticated safety management systems that better support multi-national construction projects in practice

The Relationship between God’s Gender, Gender System Justification and Sexism

Behavioral scientists and feminist theologians have long theorized that religions that primarily conceptualize God (and other divine authority figures) as male can legitimatize the social and political authority of men in society, as well as legitimatize and rationalize gender inequality. In the current study, we examined the relationship between gendered God concepts, Gender Specific System Justification and Ambivalent Sexism. In Studies 1 and 2 we found that individuals with male God concepts were higher in Gender Specific System Justification, hostile sexism (Study 1 and 2) and benevolent sexism (Study 2). In Study 3 we explored the causal relationship between gendered God concepts, Gender Specific System Justification and Ambivalent Sexism using a priming manipulation. Results revealed that individuals primed to think about God as male (vs female) were more likely to support the gender status quo. The effects found across all three studies did not differ across participant gender. Both men and women who conceptualized God as male or were primed with a male image of God were higher in Gender Specific System Justification than other gendered conceptualizations of God. Taken together these results suggest that male God concepts may reinforce the gender status quo. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed

Who Believes in a Male God? Ideological Beliefs and Gendered Conceptualizations of God

Recent studies have explored whether certain conceptualizations of God are associated with various attitudes and beliefs. In the current study, we examined the relationship between gendered God concepts and the belief that God is involved in one’s life and religious-related rigid ideologies (i.e., religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism [RWA]). Across two studies, one conducted with religious students at a Jesuit university and the other with a national sample, we found that individuals who believed God to be male were more likely to believe that God had more control and involvement in their life, had higher levels of religious fundamentalism and higher levels of RWA-Aggression (Study 1 and 2), RWA–Submission (Study 1 and 2), and RWA–Conventionalism (Study 2) than individuals with other gendered or nongendered conceptualizations of God. Implications of the broader impact that gendered God concepts have on social and political domains are explored. Last, limitations and future research directions are discussed

An atomic hydrogen beam to test ASACUSA's apparatus for antihydrogen spectroscopy

The ASACUSA collaboration aims to measure the ground state hyperfine splitting (GS-HFS) of antihydrogen, the antimatter pendant to atomic hydrogen. Comparisons of the corresponding transitions in those two systems will provide sensitive tests of the CPT symmetry, the combination of the three discrete symmetries charge conjugation, parity, and time reversal. For offline tests of the GS-HFS spectroscopy apparatus we constructed a source of cold polarised atomic hydrogen. In these proceedings we report the successful observation of the hyperfine structure transitions of atomic hydrogen with our apparatus in the earth's magnetic field.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, proceedings for conference EXA 2014 (Exotic Atoms - Vienna

Parallel application of a novel domain decomposition preconditioner for the adaptive finite-element solution of three-dimensional convection-dominated PDEs

We describe and analyse the parallel implementation of a novel domain decomposition preconditioner for the fast iterative solution of linear systems of algebraic equations arising from the discretization of elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in three dimensions. In previous theoretical work, this preconditioner has been proved to be optimal for symmetric positive-definite (SPD) linear systems. In this paper, we provide details of our three-dimensional parallel implementation and demonstrate that the technique may be generalized to the solution of non-symmetric algebraic systems, such as those arising when convection-diffusion problems are discretized using either Galerkin or stabilized finite-element methods (FEMs). Furthermore, we illustrate the potential of the preconditioner for use within an adaptive finite-element framework by successfully solving convection-dominated problems on locally, rather than globally, refined meshes