Uncovering the Organizational Vulnerability toward Construction Project Accidents: BERTopic-Based Text Mining Analysis

Construction projects are renowned for their high-risk work environments, complex process flow, and stringent time and cost constraints, which impose prolonged pressure on project organizations, particularly for vulnerable organizations, where any minor perturbation may also disrupt normal operations, potentially leading to severe safety accidents. Hence, exploring how to mitigate project organizations’ vulnerability effectively is critical to enhancing project safety performance. However, the current understanding of organizational vulnerability in construction projects is limited. There is a lack of systematic insights into the structure, distribution, and differentiated vulnerability characteristics within project organizations, as well as practical evidence to identify and mitigate vulnerability hazards. To this end, this study adopts a big data perspective and employs BERTopic to uncover organizational vulnerability characteristics from construction project accident investigation reports. Expert knowledge from focus group discussions is also incorporated to systematically identify 20 organizational vulnerability topics. Building on this, common features among the topics are qualitatively analyzed to construct an integrated framework of organizational vulnerability toward construction project accidents, encompassing exposure, rigidity, and susceptibility. Based on the constructed framework, document embedding and dimensionality reduction techniques are employed to quantitatively analyze the distribution of organizational vulnerability and clarify key directions for vulnerability management. Finally, a comparative analysis of the vulnerability distribution and intensity is conducted for project stakeholders through topic modeling that captures the differentiated characteristics of each stakeholder. Based on these findings, a practical checklist was developed to assist project management teams in identifying organizational vulnerabilities related to construction project accidents during actual operations. The results show that organizational exposure is the most prevalent vulnerability feature, followed by susceptibility and rigidity. Moreover, significant variations in vulnerability are observed among project stakeholders. The research findings enrich the existing knowledge base by providing a structured framework for understanding organizational vulnerability. Practical guidance is offered to help construction project organizations address the vulnerabilities of various project stakeholders.