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McDannald talks about Cruz, a ranch foreman. Cruz had trekked out of Chihuahua as a younger man, dozing in the brush during daylight, surviving an encounter with a cougar, and starting his journey north again and again after his capture and deportation by Border Patrol--until in West Texas his great-uncle Cleaves hired him to make four thousand adobe bricks for a new ranch house that was never built. And on his watch over the years, thirty-five tractors and pickups ceased to move. And the goats became inbred. And the barbed-wire fences slumped like strings on a mangled guitar. Cruz bore witness to the long war over the ranch fought by Cleaves's four grown children, until half the land was sold, two of the children were dead.

Improving occupational health and safety (OHS) in the construction industry can contribute to the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goals 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth). Yet, workers’ risk-taking behaviors (RTBs) remain a persistent challenge. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory and Social Information Processing Theory, this study develops and tests a social influence model to examine how foremen’s safety attitudes (SAs) shape workers’ RTBs. Drawing on survey data from 301 construction workers in China, structural equation modeling reveals that foremen’s SAs significantly and negatively predict workers’ RTBs. However, the three dimensions of SAs—cognitive, affective, and behavioral—exert their influence through different pathways. Risk perception (RP) plays a key mediating role, particularly for the cognitive and behavioral dimensions. Furthermore, interpersonal trust (IPT) functions as a significant moderator in some of these relationships. By identifying the micro-social pathways that link foremen’s attitudes to workers’ safety behaviors, this study offers a testable theoretical framework for implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (particularly Goals 3 and 8) at the frontline workplace level. The findings provide empirical support for organizations to move beyond rule-based management and instead build more resilient OHS governance systems by systematically cultivating the multidimensional attitudes of frontline leaders.

This article studies metabolic systems of food, body, and waste within the urban development politics of the city of Gurgaon (now Gurugram) in India’s National Capital Region. I link rapid urban transformation within the region, the labor required to produce it, and the speculative real estate economy that governs it to the phenomenology of body politics in the region. In particular, I examine corruption as both a political-economic and a physical, caste-based narrative to argue that corruption connects embodiment and urban development ecologies to each other. This allows corruption discourses in Gurgaon to form a critique of real estate economies; changing urban environments are felt and critiqued through body politics and experienced at once as a peril and a pleasure. This work is based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in the construction industry in NCR involving members across the production chain of real estate, including landowners, investment bankers, developers, engineers, architects, foremen, and laborers.

This article contributes to the large-scale engineering scholarship by revealing the labor practices involved and the state's role in shaping them. It provides a history of labor formation through earthwork technology in China's 1950s Huai River Control Project. The Communist Party's approach to engineering and labor differed from its Nationalist predecessor's. The party mobilized millions of peasants to dig and move an astronomical amount of soil in a few years. This herculean feat was made possible by promoting \"work methods\" to encourage peasants' self-Taylorization. The campaign aimed to cultivate a habit to work efficiently in mass-scale collaboration under external instructions. Through promoting work methods, state-appointed cadres assumed a tutelage role that allowed them to replace labor foremen. A hierarchical cadre-laborer relationship emerged from the same labor process that changed the nation's landscape.

Trackwork planning and scheduling are demanding because they require strategic foresight and must be completed well in advance. In Sweden, trackwork is performed by maintenance contracting companies during an operation period free from trains. In the contractors’ practice, once the maintenance plan is authorised, some unexpected events might interrupt the plan’s execution, leading to uncertainties. The purpose of this study is to identify and classify uncertainties and strategies applied to manage uncertainties in the contractors’ everyday planning and scheduling of trackwork. This work presents semi-structured interviews with foremen and planners at railway maintenance contracting companies in Sweden. The main findings show that in trackwork planning and scheduling, contractors deal with two types of uncertainties: internal and external. We categorised uncertainties and strategies to deal with uncertainties and described them on tactical and operational levels. The majority of the revealed uncertainties led to trackwork rescheduling. Furthermore, we suggest that current strategies to manage uncertainties applied at contracting companies can be improved by revising organisational design strategies for maintenance projects. This work increases the understanding and supports the management of uncertainties in trackwork planning and scheduling.

Russian Poland was among the most militant tsarist borderlands during the 1905–1907 Revolution in the Russian Empire. However, only a decade later, when revolutionary movements again loomed large and shook the whole region after 1917, Poland remained relatively calm. Forging a new statehood after 1918 rivaled the earlier popular drive toward social revolution. Revolution was aborted in Poland; in other rim regions of the Russian Empire, however, the situation evolved differently, and this scenario should not be taken as self-explanatory. The dynamic of political contention on the ground in the inter-revolutionary decade is the key to understand the pathways of the new state and its society. But the existing accounts deliver only a fragmentary picture, concentrating on the teleology of nation, nation state and its elites or party politics. Meanwhile, the dynamics of labor contention can be hardly squared with unanimous class or national mobilizations. This article addresses this gap drawing from an extensive collection of courses on social unrest and conflict in the Kingdom of Poland based on administrative sources from local Polish and central Russian archives (more than 3300 entries on contentious events). Covering broad available sources, it offers a picture of labor unrest spanning from tinier township workshops, insular, dispersed industrialization of smaller cities harboring quite large mills, to fully-fledged industrial power hubs. The findings show the large heterogeneity of conflict among urban workers. The initial enthusiasm of the 1905 upheaval did not hold sway for long. Workers were tired with the revolutionary mobilization, derailed by the state repression and reluctant to embark on political action again. The lore of 1905 was not an important point of reference for the forthcoming mobilizations. Instead, protests had their own rhythms and spatial patterns, resembling the pre-industrial calendar of festivities turning into insurgencies but also followed pan-imperial causes. Inter-ethnic tensions kicked in: within crews (mostly Polish-Jewish) but above all between rank-and-file workers and foremen, often of German origin. This plurality resulted in various possibilities to build a working class imagined community ranging from a single factory, through branch-wide solidarities, national filiation up to pan-imperial class alliance. Also the tsarist administration, interested in maintaining the basic stability of supply and keep the state going was an important factor. These heterogenous field of tensions did not form any cleavage conductive to singular mobilization. However, it was susceptible to broader political projects binding various claims. Such a project was a new Poland, supported by major parties and perceived by many as nothing less as a revolutionary state for a while promising anti-imperial self-assertion, national rights, political freedom, and social emancipation.

Objectives This study aimed to investigate whether change from the construction industry to work in other industries at age 45-55 years lowered risks of disability benefits (DB) later in life (60-64 years of age). We hypothesized that risks would be lowered the most among those changing from the heaviest occupations. Methods The study included men employed in the construction industry during 1971-1993. We selected workers from the largest occupational groups in heavy (concrete workers and painters) and less heavy (drivers, electricians and foremen) occupations. The occurrence of DB in 1990-2015 was retrieved from national registers. Regression analyses were used to calculate relative risks (RR) of DB at 60-64 years, comparing those working in other industries to those still in the construction industry at the age of 45, 50 and 55 years. Results Shifting out of from the construction industry was related to lowered DB risks at 60-64 years in all selected occupations. Effects were most pronounced among those who, at 55 years of age, worked in an industry other than construction, with significantly reduced RR for DB among concrete workers [RR 0.63, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.51-0.77], electricians (RR 0.61, 95% CI 0.47-0.77) and foremen (RR 0.78, 95% 0.63-0.96). Conclusions Risks for DB at 60-64 years of age were reduced among those who changed from construction work to other industries. Notable reductions were observed among workers originating from both heavy and less heavy occupations, and future studies should explore other factors, in addition to heavy workload, as motivators for leaving the construction industry.

Historians have recently shown how the concept of ‘sustainability’ (Nachhaltigkeit) first emerged through statist ambitions to enfold nature into political economy in eighteenth-century Germany. Shifting the focus from forestry to mining, this article draws upon the case of Prussian mining official Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ‘Mining School’ he founded in Bad Steben to argue that sustainable resource management also entailed the strict discipline of labour relations and a programme of ‘psychological policy’. Humboldt's Mining School sought to address administrative concerns about ‘Raubbau’ – the rash exploitation of mineral resources ‘without consideration for the future’ – by cultivating a new generation of mine foremen loyal to the state and schooled in its protocol. Ostensibly, Humboldt wished to purge the industry of ‘superstitious’ folk knowledge that undermined the state's commitment to long-term exploitation. Yet analysis of mining songs and sagas suggests a striking analogy between official and vernacular understandings of resource extraction as an ethical matter. Thus, the environmental alarms sounded by German miners around 1800 were triggered by transgressions of a social nature; and political concerns about social order in the ‘mining state’ were constitutive of material concerns about natural resources.

Chinese immigration to the Philippines has traditionally been studied in relation to commercial activities. But between 1850 and 1898, there was an unparalleled influx of Chinese labourers, which raised the number of Chinese residents to 100,000. This influx was fuelled by the abundant profits obtained by Chinese brokers and foremen, Spanish institutions and authorities in Manila, consuls in China, and Spanish and British ship captains, all of whom extracted excessive fees and taxes from the labourers. The trade in and the exploitation of Chinese labourers in the Philippines have yet to be thoroughly researched. This article shows that the import and abuse of Chinese labourers in and to the Philippines continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and that, despite some anti-Chinese Spanish colonial rhetoric, a wide range of actors and institutions, both in China and in the Philippines, took advantage of this unprecedented inflow of immigrants.

Research background: This study examines the potential impact of modifying the profiling of management and professional abilities on the performance of construction companies, with the aim of enhancing the value delivered by these organisations to their owners and consumers. To obtain a response to this inquiry, we conducted a comparative analysis of 41 construction firms operating in the South Bohemia region of the Czech Republic. Purpose of the article: In contemporary society, operational managers bear a significant responsibility for effectively guiding their subordinates towards the achievement of organisational objectives. Simultaneously, it can be argued that, considering the unavoidable transformations in the labour market, employers must embrace the skills required for the future to effectively respond to the rapidly evolving corporate landscape. Methods: This investigation involved the utilisation of correlation analysis, a one-criteria analysis of variance, and the chi-square test. Our research has provided a strong focus on the distinctive characteristics of first-line managers. Instances of this phenomenon can be observed inside construction enterprises, where it is manifested through the roles of foremen and group leaders. Findings Value Added: Moreover, fostering a wider range of soft skills is not only beneficial but also imperative. This assertion can be substantiated by illustrating the necessity for employers to embrace future-oriented talents as a means of effectively responding to the rapidly increasing pace of change within the business landscape. The implications of the solution's findings suggest that the matter of managerial and professional abilities within the building sector is presently relevant, essential, and holds social significance. This assertion holds validity when considering the industry's transformations that arise directly from the crisis.