This explored the new construct “site sense” for construction, drawing on the UK coal mining’s “pit sense” concept which has been used to describe the application of tacit knowledge and situated knowledge to managing risk.
Data was from non-participant site observations and semi-structured interviews from workers in micro-construction firms.
For background, it’s said that explicit safety knowledge is “well documented and accepted as a reliable form of knowledge in both areas, tacit safety knowledge is not as prevalent” and this may be due in part to the “discretionary and interpretivist component attached to tacit knowledge” (p467).
It’s said that for over half a century efforts have been made in the UK mining industry to recognise workers’ tacit knowledge as a valid form of safety knowledge; called “pit sense”.
Pit sense is “used by workers as a ‘flexible buffer’ for dealing with the uncertainties inherent in coalmining [and] includes workers’ ability to readily adapt to situations in the face of risks and dangers” (p468). It’s recognised to be a “craft-based understanding”, drawing on instinctive knowledge that “requires all of one’s senses and awareness” (p468). By working closely together for long periods, miners learn from one another and “gradually form their own safety culture and generate very unambiguous norm of safety” (p469).
While pit sense is recognised as a quasi-formalised safety approach in mining, miners take a different view. They see it as a “water-down version following the bureaucratisation of their safety practices” (p69) and its legitimacy challenged with the introduction of extensive bureaucracy in their industry.
The similar concept in construction has often been referred to as “common sense” but is said to have failed to receive a similar level of success. Practical knowledge and judgement on site requires the interaction of training, experience, guidance by leaders, experiential learning in new situations and from experienced peers.
The authors talk about the bureaucratic shift from informal to formalised systems of work. They note that safety matters be “detached from bureaucratic matters”, to ensure that efforts are directed primarily towards improving workplace safety rather than managing bureaucratic systems.
A challenge is that informal measures used by workers for ensuring safety may fall outside of the official work system and thus lead to disciplinary action.
Because of the common usage of the term “common sense”, the authors suggest “site sense” as an alternative that draws on mining’s pit sense concept. They thus define site sense as:
“…the tacit and situated knowledge workers exercise on construction sites. It is often taken for granted due to its ineffable nature as a result of knowledge internalisation based on many years of practice and experience” (p470).
Results
Workers during interviews referred to common sense as central for creating and maintaining site safety – leading the authors to ask “what is common sense?”. One worker was confident that common sense was equivalent to site safety but couldn’t specifically define it. This worker believed that common sense couldn’t really be taught but that you also need to keep pointing it out to people.
In essence, while believing it can’t be taught he indirectly recognised that it can and should be taught where in order for somebody to get it they need to internalise that info into tactic knowledge.
Mistakes were also a major source of learning, through incidents, near misses, discussions and other practices. Thus, experiential learning is seen as critical to site sense.
The small sized crews had a great deal of closeness and this closeness allowed them to place a lot of trust in each other. This flowed on to onboarding inexperienced workers; enhancing the capture of tactic knowledge via experienced workers.
Similarly with pit sense, these concepts “not acquired through formal training but is disseminated in situ, experientially, informally, through close social interaction and use of language, and based on the very unambiguous norm of safety” (p469).
Construction skill certification competencies / general construction induction cards were discussed next. Workers believed it wasn’t a helpful approach and that workers “came on site with preconceived
notions of what safety was meant to be and this basically interfered with their learning of good safety practices” (p473). Similar tests were said to be good for assessing explicit knowledge but not tacit knowledge.
Next discussed was the role of personal responsibility of safety, which is believed to have been underemphasised with the bureaucratisation of safety. They say that while “experienced workers rely on site sense to take care of themselves and other workers, their concept of working outside official policies may not be accepted in the workplace” and that according to the participants, it’s difficult to rely on site sense as a justification because it apparently won’t hold up in court.
In contrast, mining has always recognised mining work as a specialised job requiring expert skillset.
Construction workers are said to “use common sense to mean a more sophisticated level of knowledge that is tacit, situational and unique to years of practice on site” the term common sense makes it difficult for newcomers to construction to accept because of its links to the everyday definition; thus, the importance of something like site sense can be undervalued.
In concluding, they argue that a significant amount of tacit knowledge is used to manage risks every day on site. In mining the term pit sense has blended informal practices with more formalised ones and they recognise opportunity for this to happen more generally in construction under the guise of “site sense”.
The advantage of site sense over common sense they argue is that “the new terminology open up possibilities for transforming public perception of safety knowledge gained on site because it will be perceived as a specialist knowledge that is gained from a specific industry” (p474) and provides policymakers a “less ambiguous interpretation of the place of tacit knowledge in site safety” (p475) which may not be currently covered by rules and regulations.
Finally they argue that better recognition, respect and integration of site sense may allow organisations to “attain the best of both worlds: explicit and tacit knowledge being implemented together” (p475).
Authors: Aboagye-Nimo, E., & Raiden, A. (2016). In: P.W. CHAN and C.J. NEILSON, eds., Proceedings 32nd Annual ARCOM Conference, Manchester, 5-7 September 2016. Association of Researchers in Construction Management (ARCOM), pp. 467-476.
Study link: http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/28851/1/Pubsub6323_Raiden.pdf
Link to the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6940418103948300289?updateEntityUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_updateV2%3A%28urn%3Ali%3AugcPost%3A6940418103948300289%2CFEED_DETAIL%2CEMPTY%2CDEFAULT%2Cfalse%29
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