Analysis of Safety Management Characteristics Using Network Analysis of CEO Messages in the Construction Industry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Analysis of Safety Management Characteristics using Network Analysis of CEO Messages

sustainability-856418

Manuscript sustainability-856418 analyzed CEO messages in 100 construction companies to deduce keywords through centrality analysis and examine the characteristics of safety management. The construction industry is a highly hazardous sector, thus I appreciated the focus of the study. Having said this, I think that the paper needs to undergo some changes to be suitable for publication. I recommend that the article be revised and resubmitted following a thorough consideration of the attached list of comments.

ABSTRACT

The objectives of the study should be clearly stated: the statement “In this study, therefore, the researchers first extracted words related to safety.” does not allow the reader to understand either what has been done or which the aim of the study is.

In addition, the authors provide many detailed information regarding the method followed for the textual analysis but they do not describe either the sample on which the analysis was performed or the main results obtained. Please clarify these aspects.

L11 : please define the acronym the first time you use it.

L16: which structures do the authors refer to?

L19 and L20-22: please clarify.

INTRODUCTION

L41-46: the importance of performing this type of analysis in the construction sector should be better highlighted. The tasks and the workforce are very diversified and the workforce frequently changes also in agriculture, with important implications for the efficacy of safety communication (regarding this issue you can see Caffaro, F., Bagagiolo, G., Cremasco, M. M., & Cavallo, E. (2017). Participatory ergonomic design of a safety training tool for migrant workers in agriculture. Chemical Engineering Transactions, 58, 25-30). Please add data regarding accidents and injuries in the construction sector, and highlight what is already known about the efficacy of safety communication (regarding this issue you can see Evia, C., & Patriarca, A. (2012). Beyond compliance: Participatory translation of safety communication for Latino construction workers. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 340-367). Furthermore, I would suggest to move this part later in the introduction, not to interrupt the description of what a CEO message is and why it is important for the company safety performance.

L 67-69: these references do not seem appropriate. The authors are talking about CEO messages in a company, why introducing studies on politicians?

L69-74: here the authors comment on the methods of analysis adopted in previous studies. Please better introduce this part, by clearly separating it from the one above (which is instead about the content, of previous studies).

L75: “Information has been deduced through…”: in previous studies? Please clarify.

L78: “there are limitations in this approach”: which limitations? Is this the authors’ consideration or is it based on the literature?

L80-82: please clarify the intended meaning, too much implicit information.

L83-89: what did these previous studies find out? Why do we need a semantic analysis, instead?

L91: is this paragraph supposed to report the aim of the study? In case, please rewrite and clearly specify which aim you intended to achieve through this investigation. I have noted that there are different statements referring to the aims of the study throughout the Methods and Results sections. I suggest the authors to move these statements here to clearly explain what they intended to do.  

L94-95: which research results are the authors referring to? Please clarify.

L97-99: please clarify

L108-113: I would suggest the authors to rewrite the last part of the introduction by clearly indicating the aims of the study and the added value of this investigation in terms of: methods of analysis, content of the analysis and so on.

MATERIALS AND METHODS:

L131: is this cutoff based on previous literature? Please add information.

L133: “without bias”: please clarify.

DISCUSSION:

Overall, it seems to me that this section is little connected to the extant literature: I would suggest the authors to provide more references against which to compare and comment their results, in terms of similarities, discrepancies and added value.

L339-341: please provide references to support this statement.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper introduces an interesting research on the keyword adopted in CEO messages, suggesting the appropriate words that should be adopted in order to receive employees consensus and to produce the expected safety performance.

Please see the following comments to the manuscript.

L39-41 Please explain what you mean with "Failed safety management [...] determines whether the company itself survives.

L52 Please provide more information on the significance of "CEO message". Do you mean ordinary communication to employees? Or public statements during specific events? Or something else?

L115 Check double "in"

L119 Capitalize each word of "engineering news record"

L149-L151 Please provide more details about the sources of the investigated CEO messages. Were they all retrieved from company websites? How many of them were in English? It could be interesting to add the information about the total number of words in the CEO messages and the ratio between critical keywords and total number of words.

L242 Please specify which tool you used for network visualisation.

L428 Please separate discussion and conclusions in two different sections. Conclusions may include the contents from L428 to L465

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article brings an original results of 100 CEO messages comparison. The article could be useful for other industrial companies in construction sector and generally for other industries.

As reviewer I have no comments.

Author Response

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors did a good job in addressing my previous concerns.

Three last suggestions:

TITLE: I would make an explicit reference in the title to the sector which is being investigated, i.e. the construction industry

L17: I would specify the sample on which the analysis was performed (i.e. CEO communications from 100 global construction companies)

L600-604: I think that you could remove this last statement, since you have already acknowledged the similarities and highlighted the differences between the two sectors at the beginning of the introduction section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf