A semiotic analysis of cartoons about occupational health and safety issues in the construction workplace

Abstract

The construction industry in developed and developing countries is almost always among industries with poor safety records. In decreasing the numbers of safety incidents, society’s perception of construction workers, who are the central part of the occupational health and safety issue, can be an important learning tool for these workers in terms of self-criticism. Therefore, society’s perception of the responsibility of workers for occupational health and safety is presented by means of cartoons. For this objective, seven cartoons exhibited in the International Construction Accidents Cartoon Contest held in Turkey are examined through the General Theory of Verbal Humour, a semiotic analysis method. As the main finding, construction-based occupational health and safety perceptions of countries were found not to change significantly. Consequently, these results can have a function in guiding workers and worker unions to revise and manage the general perception of society about them. Moreover, such cartoons can be used as a lingua franca for occupational health and safety training in international construction projects where multinational migrant workers are employed.

Keywords:

• Cartoon
• construction worker
• General Theory of Verbal Humour
• occupational health and safety
• semiotics.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Anadolu University for its generous permission to reproduce the cartoons used in this study. The authors also thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments which have helped in improving the paper. Finally, the authors would like to thank the financial supports provided by the Committees on Research Grants of Bulent Ecevit University and Anadolu University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.