J Xu's scientific contributions

... Safety has risen up the construction industry agenda for reasons of culture (Al-Bayati et al., 2018), government (Eteifa and El-Adaway, 2018) and performance drivers (Choudhry et al., 2007). Despite these, safety performance in construction has been found to have plateaued in many developed countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States Guo and Yiu, 2016;H C Lingard et al., 2010;Smyth et al., 2019). There are three main reasons for this phenomenon: 1) the lack of integrated systems between organizations, such as construction clients, designers and contractors, and hence a weak safety culture in projects (Guo and Yiu, 2016); 2) the transactional business model that prioritizes commercial considerations (Rowlinson and Jia, 2015) and treats safety improvement as something of a "bolt-on extra" in decision-making (Smyth et al., 2019); and 3) reactive safety management approaches in terms of both accident prevention and performance improvement (Lingard et al., 2017). ...

... 'Blame' and 'macho' cultures are seen as another obstacle to safety behaviours (Duryan et al., 2020;Goh et al., 2018). Some work environments in the industry involve 'macho' role models, which inhibits raising concerns regarding fatigue, stress, and other health and safety issues (Goh et al., 2018), which is especially dangerous on the labour-intensive construction sites, given that fatigued and stressed workers are more (Sherratt et al., 2013;Smyth et al., 2019). To promote greater introspection and analysis of failures and near misses a cultural shift from buck-passing and fear of blame to learning from success and failure is required (Carrillo et al., 2013;HSE, 2018). ...