The behaviour-based approach has been widely used to develop
interventions for construction accident prevention (Lingard and
Rowlinson, 1998; Zhang and Fang, 2013; Zohar and Luria, 2003).
The actual effects of such interventions, however, often are not
as effective as expected. Recent studies look beyond the immediate
circumstances of accidents to shed light on systemic and institutional
factors that prevent, permit or cause the occurrence of accidents.
In the following sections, we present an institutional
analysis of construction accident causality through a systemic lens,
using heat illness cases as core events. Heat illness on construction
sites is a special type of incident in which the individual is both the
victim and, to a certain extent, an agent. (This is because the factors
of heat stress that contribute to the development of heat illness
include both environmental heat and metabolic heat. The later is
an outcome of the individual’s physical activity. In this sense, hea