Construction safety knowledge sharing by Internet of Things, Web 2.0 and mobile apps: psychological and new institutional economics conceptual analysis

摘要

The construction industry has always recorded a high work accident rate on sites. Many of these occur due to an asynchronous knowledge sharing problem. Some construction teams may only work occasionally on sites and may not be able to communicate to new teams at shift changes by the time they leave the sites. High-level subcontracting is another issue. The primary contractors may find it difficult to share safety knowledge down the line of subcontractors to reach the lowest level workers. The recent popularity in Web 2.0, mobile apps and the Internet of Things provides a new perspective on asynchronous safety knowledge sharing. Workers from different teams who never physically meet each other can now share knowledge easily by simple means. A natural starting point when conceptualizing the role of institutions in economic geography is to consider the constraints and incentives that affect economic action. This perspective, to a certain extent, coincides well with psychological theory which studies the factors that affect people's behavior. In this research paper, we study the construction practitioners' knowledge sharing behavior from 1) New institutional economic perspectives under the lens of informal institutions and 2) Psychology's perspectives such as Homan's proposition.