Shielding workers from heat stress: Reconciling the paradoxes of protection and production logics

Safety and productivity are often perceived as competing demands in a construction project organisation and the strategies of achieving them as a dilemma for project decision-making. We explore the safety-productivity paradox through an institutional logics lens. Through an in-depth single case study of climatic heat stress management in a subcontractor's project organisation under a mega-project in north Australia, the manifestations, consequences and interrelations of three institutional logics of processing safety in production are explored: The protection logic, the production logic and the reconciling logic. The results illustrate the paradoxical effects of the protection logic and the production logic and the emergence of a reconciling logic leading to innovation that improves both safety and productivity. However the reconciling logic is missing at senior and middle management levels of the production side of the organisation, and overwhelmed by the strong production logic. It is concluded that the reconciling logic can be further established and endorsed through adjusting the structure and modification of the production and human resource management system.