When Rule-Abiding Becomes Challenged: Tensions Between Three Logics in Excavation

Excavators striking a buried utility may just damage a cable but could also cause fatal electrocutions and explosions. Despite regulations and safety directives, the number of incidents continues to grow in many countries. Literature suggests that deeper interpretative insights into practitioners’ beliefs about safety rules could help improve practice and policy. This study, therefore, aims to elicit such beliefs, together with the contexts in which they are shaped and prioritised. Specifically, we draw on the concept of logical plurality to describe how values and priorities shape meaning and legitimise rule-abiding and rule-deviant behaviour in excavation work. We shadowed inspectors for five days, conducted on-site participatory observations, and interviewed 17 clients and contractors. Our abductive approach iterated between the data and logic constructs from the literature. Results show how various exogenous elements (e.g., project size, recency of excavation incidents, and experienced delays) influence the
complementarity and contradictions among three logics: accountability, production, and professionalism. This contributes an institutional perspective on safe excavation by showing how field-level contexts shape logical dominance and divergent rule-abiding behaviour of stakeholders.